The Inner Life of Comics

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