Turning Back to Her Love Pages
Turning Back to Her Love Pages glows with the extraordinary power of love and forgiveness between the ordinary people entailed in this work. Dressed in nature, Lorenzen’s poems sing with the sounds of silence in questioning love, with the sorrows for a disabled child, with the exuberance of watching for the hummingbirds’ arrival. She captures the hardness and tenderness of every life through the pages of this love song. Turning Back to Her Love Pages is a pleasure to read from beginning to end—the life insights, the wisdom, and the sweet thread of love from her title poem, “Turning Back to Her Love Pages,” on: “he wanted for her / to turn back to her love pages /and write the end of their story / from that point on in love / because love, as she taught him, / keeps no record of wrongs and never fails— / and she did.”
Lora Jones, author of Song of a Wounded Heart
Lorenzen, an astute observer of life, chronicles her parents’ love story in these heartfelt, imagery-laden, lyrical poems, where love is the central theme. Her special gift, here, is to show us that love is a choice; love is powerful, and love is the most excellent way, and those who choose love and forgiveness and lavish them on those around them change their worlds. Turning Back to Her Love Pages is a lovely and deeply moving collection as Lorenzen’s words flow so easily and gracefully, yet are honest and weighty.
Kathryn Kurz, Assistant Professor, Department of Education, York University
Judy Lorenzen’s collection of poems is a compelling effort at a wonderfully impossible task: bringing back, through words, the best features of our parents. This heartfelt collection reaches across time and memory to offer us resonant portraits of two very interesting people. Her mother and father, certainly. But more than that. The couple exemplifies crucial aspects of our Midwestern life: she, a rural Nebraska woman steeped in nature, family, and faith; he, a second-generation Greek immigrant, adopting country music alongside a hard-work ethic, mixed with Greek cuisine. Lorenzen’s poems reach after generational love, the question of “what is love anyway” when we try to imagine our elders' lives with empathy and awe. These poems teach us about heritage, home, and community–three mainstream place-conscious concepts that guided Lorenzen’s career as an educator, and now center her poems.
Robert E. Brooke, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Nebraska: Lincoln
June 2025, Kelsay Books
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