Judy Rowe Michaels is the author of The Forest of Wild Hands part of University Press of Florida's Contemporary Poetry Series, and in 2010 her second book, Reviewing the Skull, was published by Word Tech Editions. Michaels's poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry North1JJest, The New Ohio Review, The Womens Review of Books, Nimrod, River Styx, The L iterary Review, and Journal of New Jersy Poets. She has received two poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and is a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Books by Judy Rowe Michaels:

Other poems on the web by Judy Rowe Michaels:
"the birds that night"

About Ghost Notes:

"Ghost Notes is the perfect title for these percussive lyrics which begin witl1 duet and end with solo; for a musician and widow mourning her music-loving husband while fighting a fifth cancer recurrence; for a speaker neither fully present nor absent; for poems vigorously alive, hauntingly beautiful and datlµy humorous: 'does cancer love me, or not . .. drink the Contrast,/white coat, X-rays,/ say cheese'; and all told, surprisingly 'sprightly,/ good for a long night,' of pleasure in reading and re-reading this lovely, unflinching book."
—April Ossmann

"In Ghost Notes, Judy Rowe fvfichaels is alert to the sonorous and connotative power of words as she charts the vicissitudes of long-term intimacy. She writes movingly about the loss of her husband ('when I signed the forms to let you die ... ') as an entry into a suddenly unsharable world. Dark humor helps sustain her. One poem greets her cancer as an appreciative house guest; another recalls that Chekhov's body was shipped by train to Moscow in a car marked 'oysters,' a scenario in 'the absurd script that is death.' These poems uncannily transform darkness into what she finds in a glass of good Sancerre: 'quicksilver riverlight' and 'a daybreak shiver of birch leaves.'"
—J. Allyn Rosser