Books

Stray Moments

Blue Light Press, 2025

Winner, 2024 Blue Light Poetry Prize

The poems in Stray Moments are incredibly deep in their understanding of the world and our place in it. These poems do not stray; they move like light through changes in the seasons and the loves and losses of all living things. In language and insight so precise that we grow dizzy on the “cusp of ripeness and decay,” Meyers shows how, as the December sun “hangs low as if still leashed to night,” so do we hold on; how robins in February can make a heart “soar;” how it is possible to “hear the light singing/before the sun’s rim/edges over the ridge;” and that always, “Somewhere between/here and the horizon sharks circle.” These wonderful poems lead us to see how we might apprehend our own worlds, seen and unseen, and feel our “heart a caged bird/set free.”

— Patricia Lee Lewis, award-winning poet, author of A Kind of Yellow and High Lonesome.

Twisted Threads

Kelsay Books, 2024

2024 Independent Press Awards Distinguished Favorite

Joyce Meyers’ Twisted Threads is a poetic exploration of self, nature and cosmos. She starts with childhood, family, and her husband’s untimely death. As she finds solace in nature’s profusion, it becomes a source of wonder that has an almost religious intensity. Moving from personal history to ecosystem to cosmos, she inhabits the vastness and flux, finding a mix of beauty, wonder, fragility and human folly in a world imbued with “everything that hovers out of sight.” The cosmos becomes a canvas on which to stretch our senses, with “science merely a mechanism for revealing more mystery.” These poems raise big questions in lively ways with a sensitivity and imagination that keep reminding us to look up, to notice. They will reward.

—Bill Van Buskirk, Author of A Poet’s Guide to Steady Employment

The Way Back

Kelsay Books, 2017

Joyce Meyers’ poems offer breathtaking perspectives of time and space that help us place our lives in a larger context. She whirls us to exotic locales across the globe: a Buddhist temple, a Volga River boat, a humble Masai hut. But after traversing these vast expanses, she also brings us back home, where we find in the everyday scenes of our lives the true depths of the human heart.

—Dan Veach, Founding Editor of Atlanta Review, Author of Elephant Water

Shapes of Love

Finishing Line Press, 2010

Joyce Meyers’ poems shine like small and clear beacons of focused light in what can feel like a dark world; she guides the traveler on to the next respite or adventure, what is needed. Be it Tibet, memory, the country of relationship or backyard garden, readers will find a refreshing drink of poems in this collection. Her deft ear, cultivated ability to enter the witness state and keen observation of small details make her a poet of quietly powerful presence whose poems in Shapes of Love invite us to uncover, re-member and discover our own shapes of love and the ways those shapes change.

—Beth Phillips Brown, Author of Book of Enchantments

Wild Mushrooms

Plan B Press, 2007

Out of Print