RED RADIO HEART’S central persona is Carnelia. The poems are narrated in the third person, a strategy which allows the poet to deeply explore Carnelia’s longing, irony, the great joy Carnelia experiences in living and the loss she encounters as she survives. These are poems of physical and emotional fracture, of intense love, of aging, and a simultaneous joy in the world and interrogation of its cruelty. The imagery is visceral. Carnelia’s heart is a ‘red radio’ broadcasting terror and the rhapsodic.

Jane Lunin Perel has published four books of verse poetry: The Lone Ranger and the Neo American Church,1975, The Fishes: A Graphic/ Poetic Essay with artist/ photographer James Baker, Providence College Press,1977, Blowing Kisses to the Sharks, Copper Beech Press, 1978, and The Sea Is Not Full, Le’ dory Press, 1990.

She is a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Providence College where her  courses include Creative Writing in Poetry, Gender and Genocide: A Study of Holocaust Literature,  Women in Literature, Race, Class, and Gender in American Writing, and Searching for Venus: Exploring  Ideals of Female Beauty and Love in History, Psychology  and Literature. She is a grant recipient of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and has had a residency at the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Warwick, R.I. with her husband, Dr. Morton Perel.

“The Muse for Jane Lunin Perel’s new book of poems is Artemis of Ephesus, mother and goddess of fertility living in exile in the scorched 21st century.  The Muse comes through the voice of a woman, Carnelia, who speaks both of the corporeal, the metaphysical, and the personal as she interrogates the age.  The voice is generous and lavish, funny and piercing.  The book’s power comes from its exquisite pains and aching pleasures.  Not only is the book a great sensory spectacle of rose gold and purple, but also it’s a book informed of heart and a skeptical, wind-ranging, blazing mind.”

-- Bruce Smith, author of Songs for Two Voices, University of Chicago Press

... ( but whereas)in  Jane Lunin Perel’s verse  poetry she   corrals and shapes emotion through careful use of line breaks, in Red Radio Heart she cuts lose. I am reminded of Baudelaire’s dream of a poetic prose “supple and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience.” What a perfect description of Red Radio Heart.

-- Peter Johnson, author of Rants and Raves: Selected and New Prose Poems, White Pine Press

“In Red Radio Heart, Jane Lunin Perel has given us a brilliant collection of  prose poems. Whether celebrating the mundane, recounting the estrangement between mother and daughter, contemplating sex and religion, or grieving the loss of a loved one, poem after poem is imbued with nerve, wit, grace - and heart. We need more poetry like this, poetry that is as profound and poignant as it is bold and lyrical. Quite simply, Red Radio Heart is a gift.”

-- Mary A. Koncel, author of You Can Tell the Horse Anything, Tupelo Press