There is a bone-deep weariness to this new collection of poems by Paul Juhasz. It's the weariness we've all survived after a year and more of isolation during the pandemic, but Paul's is deeper, his borne of a life fractured in middle age, of love found, then lost, of endings and new, tentative beginnings. There is also something I think of as classic Paul humor, an ability to face the worst that life throws at you and make a joke of it. Stare the hangman down, then make him laugh, right before he pulls the lever. But there's more. Though darkness, "the bear," always lurks (source, Paul reveals to us, of all great comedy), he has discovered in this collection something much finer than that, the mysterious thing we call poetry. There are lines in these poems, prose and lineated, of surpassing beauty. There are moments in these lines, in these poems, when the comic rests and the poet takes over, and we find ourselves mesmerized and lifted into a kind of peace that lets us know Paul has travelled through the darkness and come out on the other side full of truths and beauties that sustain long after the laughter fades. --Hank Jones, author of Too Late for Manly Hands