Cecilia Woloch

These poems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and across European and American landscapes, encountering lovers, strangers, and beloved ghosts. They arrive, finally, in a place of beauty, mystery, grief, and joy. Poems from this collection were selected by Marie Howe as winner of the 2006 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award.

Late is driven by the alternating energies of prose poems and free verse. Woloch understands a person’s true -relationships with family, friends, and lovers arrive late—if at all. The exquisite pathos in these poems disclose Woloch’s abiding empathy for family, children, ex-lovers, and strangers.

Loosely woven, this history of the Rom people is also a travelogue, following the passage of identity, back up the road of exile to the ancestral village, one of many, where the author's vanished family is remembered as they were when, most un-gypsylike, they were at home. "Cecelia Woloch reinvents herself as a gypsy fire of language, a 'single word' set flaming as a daring, dancing lyric conflagration in the reader's hand" —Carol Muske-Dukes.