BOOKS AND EBOOKS...

DENISE LA NEVE - HALF-LIVES OF THE RADIUM GIRLS

In this debut book of poetry, New Jersey poet Denise La Neve moves from a quiet center of memory — charmed summers in a remote village in the Vosges Mountains of France — to the hard realities around us, where numbers take on arcane meaning, science reveals the secrets of prehistory, and medicine adds its jargon to the mysteries of aging and vulnerability. LaNeve travels afar, not only in the present-day on foreign jaunts and geological amber hunts, but also in the past. As a poet engaged with history, a time traveler, she chooses to narrate in poems the plights of women in danger: stalked in London by Jack the Ripper, smothered and burned in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or slowly poisoned by radium in a factory that made “glow in the dark” wristwatches.

La Neve writes both poetry and fiction. She was a contributor and editor for a trilogy of three “Poets of the Palisades” anthologies: Beyond the Rift (2010), META-LAND (2016), and On the Verge (2020). Her work has also appeared in literary journals, such as Quill and Parchment, Exit 13, The Istanbul Literary Review, Sensations Magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, and Platform Review. She co-hosts The Palisades Poetry Series and The High Mountain Meadow Poetry Series, centered in northern New Jersey, with both in-person and zoom events.

Advance praise for Half-Lives of the Radium Girls, by Denise La Neve (The Poet’s Press, 2024).

“Honest, accessible and original, the deeply-felt poems in Denise La Neve’s Half-lives of the Radium Girls address such wide-ranging subjects as the passing of Lisa Marie Presley, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and, in “Ghosts,” the poignant wishes of the deceased: the dead want to sleep/if they want anything. But whatever her subject, La Neve returns always to the essential question of how we face both tragedy and wonder.” —Catherine Doty, American poet, author of Momentum and Wonderama

“Half-Lives of the Radium Girls captures history and autobiography with equally vivid details and thoughtful revelations, sometimes taking a turn midway through a poem to illuminate its subject from a striking angle. A tribute to the late daughter of Elvis turns into a meditation on the loss of friendships; a contemplation of death arrives at the conclusion that all humans are possessed by ghosts; a poem about gambling odds and mathematical probabilities turns out to have been a love poem all along. I could never quite predict what I would be reading about each time I turned the page, and in the end, I felt as if I had borne witness to an entire lifetime of unique experiences and hard-earned wisdom. — Anton Yakovlev, American poet and translator, author most recently of One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean.

“Denise La Neve debuts with a wide-ranging collection of poems informed by history, places near and far away, various disciplines of science, the untold or erased lives of women — and by an avid, searching eye for beauty, which she unveils again and again.” —George Witte, American poet, editor-in-chief of St. Martin’s Press, and the author most recently of An Abundance of Caution

“Denise achieves a rare thing in these poems, finding the humanity in both the grand pages of history and the smallest beating heart. This is the life's work of a poet, grappling with love and loss, the past and future, joy and sadness, handling all with the empathy and understanding of expert hands. These are words that demand to not only be read, but to be lived with.” —Josh Humphrey: American poet, and Director of the Kearny Library.

“In Half-Lives of the Radium Girls, La Neve’s poems float like satellites above the Earth. Her enchanting encapsulations of beauty and loss drift from the Mullica River to the Aegean Sea. As she dissects death by name or number or describes love without name or date, her imagination is imbued with memories and empathies, whether mining her own life of its still-fresh radium, or the half-lives carefully researched and long gone. As a poem hovers in orbit, we gaze in admiration at La Neve’s craft of luminosity.” —Alison Ruth, author of Starlight Black and the Misfortune Society and Near-Mint Cinderella

This is the 317th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published September 2024. ISBN 110 pages, paperback, 6 x 9 inches, $13.95. ISBN 979-8336390414. Kindle epub edition $2.99. CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON.

BACK TO CATALOG MAIN PAGE

Version 1.1 Updated January 12, 2026.