Cover art “Bridge View” by Vincent Hawley

*Along River Road*, April 13, 2009 - One of my favorite iPhone photos from the many I’ve taken of the Delaware River over the years.

Edge of Highway

My new collection Edge of Highway (Finishing Line Press, 2025) has been released.

Set against a backdrop of highways, backroads, and nature’s seasonal shifts, the poems in Edge of Highway delve into how a long daily commute provides opportunities for self-reflection, reconciliation, and the sorting of emotional entanglements.

Order your copy today.

Praise for Edge of Highway

“J. A. Lagana’s spare and lovely poems find music and momentum in the slow lane or on the exit ramp, along a detour route, in a roadside cafe, even stalled before pre-dawn roadwork flares. Her language is by turns euphonious and honest, playful and pining, bemused and attentive, its rhythms of a piece with the goings out and comings back of the daily grind. Realizations take root, hopes find their terms, and questions get resolved, if tentatively.

In each poem the natural world speaks through metaphor as a voice within that teaches. The compactness of these poems suits to the contained nature of the car, the lane, the poet’s sure voice, disinclined as it is to waste syllables or pad lines.

Edge of Highway gives profound testimony to the fact that no stretch of hours in any given day is merely interstitial, that “there from where” and “there to where” are equally present in the journey forth—and the journey back.”

–Terence Culleton, author of A Tree and Gone and A Communion of Saints

“Edge of Highway pulls us into a contemplative journey, the kind that takes place alone on a daily commute. Lagana’s beautiful imagery braids the natural and built worlds, creating a liminal space where white center lines of a monotonous road become “rhinestoned,” and “dawn and sparrows lift” “like blankets strewn / across a lovers bed.” The act of reading these poems becomes the drive itself. Gently, they urge us to pay attention; they escort us as we sort out life’s entanglements in spite of the fact that “most mornings, / it’s tough to make the light.” I simply fell into these poems and did not want to exit.”

–Katharine Cristiani, author of Preserving the Unraveled

“J.A. Lagana’s Edge of Highway is a gift, “Proof there’s beauty everywhere,” even in the daily commute to work: amidst traffic & exit signs & road work, she finds “barns and fields a-smudge,” “A crescent moon/tipped so low against the field/that I still regret /not risking/a second glance.” In verse that manages to be both dream-like and grounded, spare yet pregnant with meaning, Lagana illuminates the journeys we all take: from loss to wholeness, from friction to reconciliation, from the often-unnoticed to an awareness that even seemingly simple things can transcend appearances.”
~ Jennifer H. (Amazon Review)

Make Space

Make Space (Finishing Line Press, 2023) explores the complexities of loss, family ties, and resiliency.

The poems in this collection speak to the wisdom grief has to impart to us, as well as to the kinship we form with it.

Click here to read a poem from Make Space.

Available from Finishing Line Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

Order your copy today.

Reading at a New Hope Poets gathering.
Photo credit: Roy Wordsmith

Praise for Make Space

“…Make Space, is a stunning testament to loss and a keen reminder of hope and resilience. With masterful use of white space, Lagana creates luminous gems, with breathy and seemingly breathless interjections. Exploring the depths of grief and loss, and the dreamlike mosaic of healing, the speaker makes space for grief and memory, and even reconciliation and hope, in a tapestry woven by “What grief said.”

–Donna J. Gelagotis Lee, author of Intersection on Neptune and On the Altar of Greece

“Never have I seen a collection of poems where grief is gifted the space to speak, but Make Space gives us that and so much more. Make Space is full of tenderness and a grief that says “I won’t always interfere. / I promise….”

–C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022)

Normally, I prefer to read poems slowly, a few a day, savoring them over time, but I became so absorbed in that luminous world Lagana creates, the one where things are both achingly real and devastatingly beautiful, that I read it all in one sitting. This is a collection I know I will return to, as there is much to ponder and the writing is superb.

—Jennifer Randall Hotz

About Me:

Poet and novelist (See recent publications.)
Author of the recently released chapbook Edge of Highway (Finishing Line Press. 2025).and the poetry collection, Make Space (Finishing Line Press, 2023).
Creative writing and poetry writing consultant
Essayist
Multi-genre writing workshop facilitator, Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) trained
Founder and former co-editor, River Heron Review, including Poems, for Now, 2018 - 2023.
Academic Supervisor (retired) of Art, English, and Music, Freehold Regional High School District (FRHSD), 1996 - 2020
Ed.M (‘87), Educational Administration and Supervision, Rutgers University
Teacher of English and creative writing, FRHSD, 1983 - 1996

Land Acknowledgement:
As a resident of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, I respectfully acknowledge that I live and work on land that is part of the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape people.