Dazzling and refractive, each poem is jeweled with crisp movement and deliciously musical words-provocation, inquiry, and insight open into vast spiritual and philosophical realms. DeNicola explores landscapes of her own passion, her mother’s decline, and her father’s death and imagined afterlife through the eyes of a true visionary. These poems, extraordinary in their hard-earned wisdom, transform the personal into something beyond universal-the possibility that each life, encompassing its own suffering, questing and small ecstasies, is really a stage towards a greater becoming.
-Leslie Ullman
The pivotal keystone of The Impossible is DeNicola’s fearless, twenty-one part poem that seeks to realize-how a young surgeon, her father, stumbled from his life and hers, by severe rigor ennobling his afterlife’s insights into death’s convergence, body and spirit fused, erased in relief and regret’s grim pattycake. I’ve never read anything so powerfully faithful, so selflessly ambitious to assent to the soul’s truth-no poetry I know is so clear-eyed, so sorrowful, so stern. After this kenosis, or self-emptying-poem after poem astounds.
-Kenneth Rosen
DeNicola’s The Impossible is stunning throughout- however there’s nothing quite like the middle sequence of poems about her father, a Chief of Surgery, and his sudden untimely death by overdose. This sustained elegy propels the reader deep into the mind of a physician who wanted- to hold notes/of compassion for invasions of pain. We watch the poignant journey as the veil opens onto metaphysical layers of a higher awareness, (reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno) towards a radiant exclamation … ./ white as the light which shone through each being /made of matter. -Grey Held
Deborah DeNicola’s work in The Impossible is possibly her best. Her poems, which come from the realm where the Muse Goddess dreams, are prayers and incantations of myth, love, desire and transcendental euphoria. With the rare ability to transfix and hypnotize, in a world luxuriously realized, a landscape jazzed with music, her beats move forward as each perfect piece softly explodes. These poems of the sublime light up my synapses like a sundog or constellation. My body aches with their intuitive light.
-Lenny Dellarocca.
