JOAN LOGGHE
  • Home
  • Biography
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Workshops
  • Contact

Joan Logghe

Poet, Teacher, Grandmother

Read More

Read Joan's Work

Picture
Jade Bird: Singing Grief
Wild Rising Press, 2024

Purchase from Collected Works or your local independent bookstore


Joan Logghe explores the mysterious confluence of grief and beauty in her latest work, a memoir of her family’s extraordinary discovery of resilience and meaning amidst profound sorrow. A family loses a child at birth. With guidance from dreams and support from their community, they weave together rituals and ceremonies that bring deep spiritual meaning into an impossibly painful time. The baby’s grandmother, Joan, wrote poems and painted in bright watercolor as she worked through her own grief process. Those poems and images became the backbone of this book, which chronicles her family’s navigation through the valley of death.


Picture
Unpunctuated Awe : Santa Fe Poems
Tres Chicas Books, 2016

Poems composed while Joan Logghe was serving as the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe. These poems were written on site and all were written as love songs for the city and northern New Mexico, her home of 43 years.


Purchase from Barnes & Noble
Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
Odes & Offerings: A Collaborative Exhibit of Poetry and the Visual Arts
Sunstone Press, 2013

''Odes & Offerings'' was a unique collaboration between The City of Santa Fe Arts Commission Community Gallery, the City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate, Joan Logghe, and a host of talented local poets and artists. Conceived by Logghe in close consultation with The City of Santa Fe Arts Commission Community Gallery Manager, Rod Lambert, the original exhibit, which ran from March 23, 2012 to June 8, 2012, paired the work of local poets with visual artists. The results were more than just poetry-inspired artworks. Every piece became a true integration of poetry and form. With this rich, authentic cross-pollination at its core, ''Odes & Offerings'' became an event that brought the community of Santa Fe, New Mexico together around the spoken word and visual arts. This book serves as a lasting record of an inspired exhibit and the many outstanding individuals who made it possible.


Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
The Singing Bowl
The University of New Mexico Press, 2011

This poetry collection showcases all the features of Joan Logghe's work that have attracted so many readers: her attention to detail, her warmth, humor, and passionate and inclusive social conscience. At once postmodern and deeply rooted in her adopted northern New Mexico home, Logghe's work connects disparate events and objects.
​
​Finalist for New Mexico Book Award,  Women Writing The West WILLA Award and The Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.

Watch a Book Trailer for The Singing Bowl

Purchase from Barnes & Noble
Purchase from UNM Press

Picture
Love & Death: Greatest Hits
Tres Chicas Books, 2011

Love & Death selects poems from the publications of co-conspirators, friends for over twenty-five years, and founders of Tres Chicas Books Renée Gregorio, Joan Logghe, and Miriam Sagan. As poets with intertwined geographies, friendships, and loves, the poems show the threading as they've fallen in love, mourned deaths of beloveds, and let that passion inform their poetry. They deliver a triptych of poetry in one cover, hoping to create not just a book but a sense of community.

Winner, New Mexico Book Award in Poetry


Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
Rice
Tres Chicas Books, 2005

Joan Logghe says of her book, Rice, "One night I wrote four poems on a long sheet of rice paper. I noticed they had a uniform shape and decided to give myself the pleasure of writing domestic sonnets. For two and a half years they spilled off of rice paper and into my computer. I have always played with how you can make art in the cracks of the daily, in this case the amount of time it takes for rice to cook, and at the end of the boiling, there is a poem. This book was held together by rice. It is as formal and as formless as those grains, both cooked and uncooked."


Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
Blessed Resistance
Mariposa Printing & Publishing, 1999

A triptych of poems focusing in turn on culture, family, and the personal landscape of marriage. With a wild and carefully-crafted voice Logghe tackles the unspeakable beauty of northern New Mexico's Espanola Valley, confronting the resistance to entering this unique territory as an outsider.


Purchase from Abe Books
Purchase from Wayside Books

Picture
Sofía
La Alameda Press, 1999

Among the Spanish people who settled New Mexico four centuries ago were Jews forced into exile during the Inquisition. This series of thirty poems reveals the life of one of these crypto Jews, a Hispanic woman with a Sephardic background. Drawing on the stories and lives of actual women as well as on the author's own life in the Española Valley, these poems, written in English and translated into Spanish, are presented bilingually in this powerful book.

Finalist, Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award

Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
Another Desert: Jewish Poetry of New Mexico
Sherman Asher Publishing, 1998

Blending history, celebrations, and reconciliation of Jewish traditions with life in New Mexico, the circle of the Jewish year is saturated by the New Mexico experience as tashlich is performed in a desert river, and Passover coincides with Good Friday pilgrims making a holy journey to the Santuario de Chimayo. Includes work by Marjorie Agosin, Yehudis Fishman, Gene Frumkin, Natalie Goldberg, Judyth Hill, Joan Logghe, Consuelo Luz, Carol Moldow, Judith Rafaela, Miriam Sagan, and others.

​
Finalist, Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award

Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
Catch Our Breath: Writing from the Heart of AIDS
Mariposa Printing & Publishing, 1996

A collection of prose and poetry from WRITE ACTION, an open writing group serving members of the AIDS community in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Voices include longtime AIDS survivors, friends, family members, caregivers, and students coming of age in complex times. Editor Joan Logghe has discovered the breath of inspiration that vitalizes the HIV/AIDS community.

Purchase from Common Crow Books

Picture
Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man
La Alameda Press, 1995

Long-term relationships are a subject we don't hear much about today, but this book of love poems is a realistic and eloquent account of marital tenacity. The fifty poems in the collection move from the earliest "Taking Vows" to deal with "The Middles" and such subjects as not committing adultery. 

​
Finalist, Western States Book Awards

Purchase from Abe Books

Picture
What Makes A Woman Beautiful
Pennywhistle Press, 1993

Joan Logghe's enthusiasm for poetry is reflected in her teaching and performance methods. Wife, mother of three children and poetry editor of Mothering Magazine, Joan has enjoyed serving as a New Mexico Artist-in-Residence- working with elders, prisoners, the deaf, and elementary and college students. Recipient of an NEA award for her poetry, Joan is also the author of A Lunch Date With Beallty and Poems From the Russian Room. Her work has appeared widely in a number of small press publications and anthologies. Joan lives in the Espanola valley where many of her poems are rooted and where she continues to offer writing workshops both nationally and locally. Her poems deal with themes of everyday life in a sensuous manner and soar beyond the passions of this world. 

Purchase from Abe Books

Joan's books are available at your local independent bookstore, online, or by contacting Joan Logghe

Order Signed Copies from Joan

Read Excerpts of Joan's Poetry at sfpoetry.org


The heart loves what it wants to love.
It goes where it has to go.
It beats for you before your birth,
without asking you until your death.
It is serving you now, flowers on
stems, silver on wrists, the pulse
for perfume, ears full of music,
slants of color. Little child
leaning at the balcony. Large
horses running for joy.  This
is the song you don’t listen to.
The boy says, “There’s a clock
in me.” It is ticking out thanks.
This troubadour, this saint.
​
                        - from the PoemHolders project

Picture

Picture
Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.