A Slow Journey to Totality

In Diane Vogel Ferri's A Slow Journey to Totality, she begins with the clear affirmation that "knowing is better than not knowing." At times soul-searching and grief-stricken, at times breathtakingly radiant and transcendent, this collection explores themes of family and faith, birth and death, gender and the art of aging. In her poem "The Leaving," Ferri's imagined moment of earthly departure is triumphant: "(If you are in church do not pray for me, / just sing and I will hear you.)" and, "The earth is a molecule now, / I'm holding gold dust in my hands, / I'll leave a portal open for you." By her journey's end, she has found her divine truth: "I sit squarely in the mercy seat, / having walked there on my knees." Ferri has found her totality, and she is knowing.

-Dianne Borsenik, author of Flight of Honey and Raga for What Comes Next, Editor/Publisher at NightBallet Press



Diane Vogel Ferri's tender and emotive new poetry sequence, A Slow Journey to Totality, leaves a bold and generous "portal open for" the reader to join her in exploring a lifetime encompassing innocence, longing, loss and personal evolution-through hard and soft, open and heavy and sometimes "hollow arms"; through faith, hope, parenthood, and myriad layers of relationship; as well as through "decades of music" and "brilliant mystery"-to find meaning, beauty, and well-earned light in the fullness of time. Ferri deserves gratitude for allowing us to accompany her on this journey, and for providing navigational landmarks to guide us on our own.

-John Burroughs, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate, 2022-23



In A Slow Journey to Totality, Diane Vogel Ferri guides us into a quietude that wakes us to the wonders of this world. But her tour is no easy travel through feminist struggles, wars, and the deaths of parents and friends. Accompany Ferri "as a charm of finches arrive / in this lotus land." We will have all gone on this journey where we can go no further but resurrection.

-Ray McNiece, Heights' Poet Laureate and Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award winner