Moon Tide Press, 2023
Kissing
the Wound
Available at Moon Tide Press or anywhere books are sold.
J.D. Isip's second full-length collection of poetry and prose asks us to consider where we look for healing.
Scroll to read early praise for Kissing the Wound...
LaToya Watkins
Kissing the Wound is a thoughtful, sometimes political, astonishingly moving collection by a passionate writer. This is what writing should be about: honesty, integrity, love, hate, compassion, strength, and weakness. If a reader isn't moved by this book, then the reader isn’t breathing.
Charles Jensen
If our memory could shatter like glass and be reassembled with no regard given to time, it would look like these poems: a shimmering window of stained glass whose patterns and glow create unexpected resonances of the many lives one voice can be given. As identities—familial, sexual, spiritual, amicable—intersect and intertwine, time folds in on itself. Everything can and does happen at once. Kissing the Wound is expansive, enveloping. With cross-genre bravery and unfettered honesty, J. D. Isip’s collection examines, at its core, a question of love: for each other, and for ourselves.
jory mickelson
With a deep vocabulary, attuned to the nuances of the heart, J.D. Isip navigates us through the uncertain waters of both language and life. Kissing the Wound brims life: soundtracks, court rooms, memory, cheap drinks, literature, and the medical-industrial-complex. The whole world is taken in and sifted through with an attentive ear, catching each poem's song through the world's radio static. These writings ask us if we wish to remain safe, or if we really want to risk it all and live.
gustavo hernandez
There is a palpable struggle against powerlessness in J.D. Isip’s Kissing the Wound, and in its expertly crafted poems, the path to victory in that struggle always originates from within. Although its external expression varies from poem to poem (telekinesis, immense empathy, razor-sharp wings, conquering love), Isip shows us that the greatest power we have is our ability to remember, to render, and to navigate the “mess of lights and music” that is the human experience.
AE Hines
In poetry and prose, J.D. Isip’s Kissing the Wound examines the nature of rejection, as well as what each of us must risk for genuine human connection. “God is a collection of all of us,” he writes, and “wounds deserve to be cared for.” In language both sensuous and spiritual, Isip provides a salve for these wounds. “Too human for heaven, / too angel for the earth,” he has created a space where salvation begins in one’s self.