Womb-Weary is James Ragan’s long awaited follow-up to his award winning collection, in the Talking Hours, which earned him immediate international critical attention as an important voice in contemporary poetry. His verse has been praised as “splendidly candid, original, energized” (Michael Harper); “an exiting experience in poetry” (Susan Fromberg Schaeffer); and “dry ice smoking from contact “ (Los Angeles Herald Examiner).
It is no surprise, then, that his new book, Womb-Weary, chronicles a soul-searching odyssey through the international landscape of human joy and suffering, a private charting of a terrain both physical and metaphysical. To a poet who, like a Joycean Ulysses , must return to the harsh private conceptions of reality which memory gives, Ragan explores the relationship between child-hood experience and mankind’s universal birthing into a “world-room” where man’s infinite gift of irrationality is constantly evolving and devolving.