Chasing Justice

poems by Joanne Durham

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The focus of Chasing Justice is reflected in the epigraph by E. B. White: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” In this collection, poet Joanne Durham weaves together these two desires, searching for equanimity in her inner spirit while engaging with the injustices of the outside world. 

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-971191-24-9 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

Released July 7, 2026 | Copyright 2026

114 pages

Author Biography

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press, 2022), which won the Sinclair Poetry Prize, and the chapbook On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her poems have won the Maxine Cassin Poetry Prize, the Miriam Chaikin Poetry Prize, the Mary Ruffin Poole Poetry Prize, and Third Wednesday magazine’s Poetry Prize. She has also received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and was a finalist for the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the James Applewhite Prize, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, Lit South Poetry Contest, Mary Blinn Poetry Contest, Ruminate’s Broadside Prize, Naugatuck River Review’s Narrative Poetry Contest, NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award, and the NC State Poetry Contest. An earlier version of this book was a runner-up for the White Pine Press Poetry Book Award and finalist for the Blue Light Poetry contest. Her poetry appears widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Poetry East, River Heron Review, Vox Populi, Writers Resist, Cold Mountain Review, The Wonder of Small Things anthology edited by James Crews, and The Nature of Our Times anthology. Durham teaches poetry workshops at the Osher Lifelong Learning Center at UNC Wilmington, and online through Yellow Arrow Publishing and Maine Media College and Workshops. She co-hosts the Island Arts Council’s monthly Poetry Thursdays in Carolina/Kure Beach, NC, and lives with her husband on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. When she’s not writing, reading, or talking about poetry, she practices yoga, plays tennis, delights in her grandkids, and works for a better world for them to grow up in. Learn more about her at www.joannedurham.com.

Endorsements

“It’s good to read poems that care about the world, that love the fish, the comet, the shoulder and its freckles, the body with its frailties. ‘Everything counts,’ this poet reminds us, and we are lucky to count the world’s blessings alongside her.”
—Danusha Laméris, author of Blade by Blade

“Chasing Justice is a wonderful creation of song and scar, of deep vulnerability and raw humanity, of emotional complexity and simple witness. In a world where empathy is under threat of erasure, Durham’s heartfelt, conceptual poetry delicately balances what is broken with our constant reaching for something beautiful. There’s such sharpness to Durham’s metaphors, such richness to the painfully stirring world she builds for us, both defining and pushing against the edges of our shared human experience.”
—John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another

“Author Joanne Durham explains, ‘I want to tread gingerly / through everything / that falls   rots     weeps on this earth.’ In her important new collection, she crafts poems that ‘widen the aperture’ and examine both beauty and atrocity as we ‘[float] in space / on gravity’s whim / held whole by balance . . . ’ A cleared-eyed citizen of this ‘weathered’ earth, Durham ‘knows / there’s work ahead.’ Throughout this book, she joins justice to a hope that affirms the ‘moon and stars we still [believe] in.’”
—Marjorie Maddox, author of Small Earthly Space

“I like this lively, lyrical collection of poems very much, with its urgency of engagement and its very human narratives. The engagement is both cultural and personal. In a prefatory epigraph, Durham quotes E. B. White about the daily challenge of striving to both ‘save’ and ‘savor’ the world, and she accepts that challenge, in a voice that probes, quests, and praises, that laments, argues, and affirms. There’s a sureness of cause at the core of Chasing Justice. The collection’s call to action, finally, is addressed as much to the writer herself as to her readers: to ‘see (each other) in our own stained mirrors’ and ‘to rise above everything that tries to make us sink.’” 
—Derek Kannemeyer, author of Mutt Spirituals and Found Voices

“Connections in all their ‘fickle symbiosis’ are revealed and celebrated in Chasing Justice. Joanne Durham’s attentive, aching poems speak of salt, gravity, paper cranes, book bans, dust, doom scrolling, alchemy, and so much more—as if to answer the eighth-century Tamil poet Andal’s question, ‘What use is this howling tenderness?’”
—Laura Grace Weldon, author of Universe Marveled In a Jar

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