Amazon intuitivegateways.com intuitivegateways.com Category:  Poetry Publisher: Word Tech Communications ISBN-10:  1936370204 Pages: 81 Copyright: 2010 ISBN-13: 9781936370207 Price: $18.00 (eBook) :Caught in the rich crisis of being, DeNicola looks to find a site of transfiguration, a mountain upon which the self is opened and changed."--Mark Doty, Winner of the National book Award for Poetry "In language that is both stunning and devastating, these poems enact journeys between earth's shore and the shore of the infinite world, and back again. With heart and with courage they remind us that all we have is our naked selves, that love and loss are to be equally honored: "You can't lose or refuse what's yours." —Maragaret Lloyd This is lush and generous book, a stirring of myth and childhood always coming home to the flesh.  A Gnostic Mary and a young girl on a swing are at home in the same dream space.  Deborah DeNicola has written her richest book, and one to get delightfully lost in.   —Doug Anderson   Excerpt Bethany John 12:1-8 Mary Magdalene in Stained Glass, The Church of Rennes-le-Chateau. I was wiping his feet with my hair when I heard Judas snicker over the salve. The spikenard, its pungent scent, its expense. Christ waved him away, scolded his calculation, that paltry sum. What jewel, what gem or silver could steady the scale? I let my fingers travel and they cried out, racing circles in small figure eights on top of each foot . . . Oh, the moons of the toes, those pale nails—his worn skin like crepe- everlasting. I wanted his body intact though he’s shared the intricacies of the pact with me alone. My hair hid my tears, the way smoked clouds hide rain. We are circumscribed on this earthen stone. Noosed in our own Uroborus--What we knew was incomplete. What is destiny next to the body’s love? The hair on my neck stood up at the thought of the olive grove, the centurion’s severed ear. And how does one face © Copyright Deborah DeNicola. All rights reserved. | www.intuitivegateways.com the climax of what one desired so much--oh the wash, the rubbing unguent. Just touch— just touch, such as it is on this serpentine rock.

Amazon Readers Review
In "Original Human", Deborah DeNicola gives us another of her important contributions to the soul. In every poem she continues her work of connecting body and spirit via soul--her sensuality always extending to and rooted in spirit, her divine insights always connected to everyday life--work, travel, food, sex. Thus from DeNicola we learn again what we desperately need always to remember: not only are the body and spirit connected in a continuum, but we all are. Her poetry is always sensual and always insightful, pleasurable in the old sense of the word: Pleasure was the child of the marriage of Eros and Psyche, love and soul. One cannot not love these poems, for this is where they all begin, in love of the immediate and the longing for the eternal. Thus her Original Human is all of us, our beginnings and our ends.
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5.0 out of 5 starsEloquent Poems
By Nancy Wait on August 1, 2011
Format: Paperback
I love when a poet takes me on a journey inside places I never would have thought to go. Deborah DeNicola does this to perfection in her new book, Original Human. The poems are divided into three sections, Oracles, Worlds, and Edens. Oracles begins with Ascension Thursday and ends with The Gospel of Mary, and in between we find poems about Mary Magdalen, John Baptizing Jesus, Theresa in Ecstasy, and the Last Judgment, to name a few, yet all of which give us a different angle, a fresh take on these well-worn stories. In Worlds DeNicola takes us into worlds we've seen in paintings or read about in novels, and worlds only she has been to--a world of rushing words spilling out almost as if she can't stop them, yet all are eloquent and suggestive, and make me realize how many thoughts and feelings simply cannot be expressed in prose, and only poetry will do. My favorites are the love poems like Original Human and When He Said, but I enjoyed them all. I enjoyed being taken into the alternate universe of DeNicola's generously endowed imagination where the mind soars, the heart opens, dreams fly, and always there is a return to the body. With these poems she makes life richer for all of us.