In With the Old, Out With the New

Jude Lally

Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you Jude Lally's third volume of poetry. In With the Old, Out With the New arrives eight years after I'm Fine But Thanks for Asking and eleven years after The View From Down Here—the very first book to come out of Accents Publishing. Poetry has always taken center stage in Jude's life and this latest volume of poetry reflects the author's growth.

What Others Say About In With the Old, Out With the New

In this year of COVID, we bump up against imposed boundaries that close in our lives. But now we have Jude Lally's third volume of poetry to help us put some perspective on what it means to live a confined life. With sharp wit, understated humor and an ear for language, he invites us into a constrained world that he has made expansive. It's a world full of a young man's yearning for contact. His verse describes his desire to embrace an assorted cast of characters who make up his family, friends, lovers, caregivers, bartenders, people in the street, and his own inner self. He makes his particular circumstance universal to leave us with a better understanding of what it means to live in our state of fragile existence. I think of Jude as the Stephen Hawking of poetry, soaring like a hawk above us, crying for each of us to live fully in the moment.

—Jim Lally

In Jude Lally's latest poetry collection, his pen is alive and well as he explores the ups and downs of relationships and life with a chronic degenerative disease. In these poems placed in three sections, the poet yearns for experiences of the body most take for granted—"to get laid or get in a fight." His mind is sharp—"having this mental capacity/lacking basic ability" and his humor is on full display in poems about a sassy clock, the gender dynamic of electrical plugs, a three-year-old unused condom, and his old nemesis, gravity. Despite love found and lost, "the ataxia" that is "undeniably what's attacking me," and the fear of what is to come, he remains hopeful using his writing as meditation and medicine. "&ellip; catch me on a good day you'll find me all smiles." And as Jude has learned throughout his decade-long struggle with the unknown, life is happening today. "Now is the time to write."

—Eric Scott Sutherland

From whimsical relationship advice to heartbreaking details of a long-term struggle with Friedreich's Ataxia, Jude Lally's poems do not leave us indifferent. We root for the speaker in this book, and his success at the "full-time job" of living; we become invested in his interactions with friends, relatives and loves. Many of the poems offer a philosophical view of life, derived from a unique point of view and we are thankful for the author's poetic discoveries.

—Katerina Stoykova

Leftovers

Sitting, sifting
through old poems
it occurs to me

that these pages
are akin to the
contents of a deep-

freeze: frozen
fresh for retrieval.
Snapshots of

living legacy,
ready to be thawed
and enjoyed later

without losing
initial flavor. Though
memories have gone

cold they wait
to be pulled out,
reheated, re-served, retold.

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: February 1, 2021
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-63-6
Price: $16.00

About the Author

Determination has always been Jude Lally's middle name. Whether on the Little League baseball field in elementary school, on the football gridiron in middle school or on the wrestling mat in high school, he always gave it his all. But halfway through high school, at the age of 16, Jude was handed his biggest challenge of all when he was diagnosed with a rare genetic degenerative progressive neuromuscular disease called Friedreich's Ataxia. Daily living as he had known it changed forever. There were new obstacles to overcome, and overcome he did, as two years later he became a proud high school graduate. But he didn't stop there. Five years later he also became a college graduate when he received a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of Kentucky. But as reality set in and the likelihood of landing a job seemed out of reach, Jude turned to his love of writing to help him cope. While talking about his struggles didn't come easy for him, writing about them did. He cultivated that need to write by joining a writers' group that met weekly in Lexington, Kentucky. That's where he met his future publisher Katerina Stoykova of Accents Publishing. In With the Old Out With the New is Jude's third collection of poems published by Accents Publishing. As in The View From Down Here, published in 2010, and I'm Fine But Thanks for Asking, published in 2012, Jude's unique way with words, combined with a sprinkling of Irish wit passed down from his late father, will have you both laughing and crying at the same time if you're not careful! One of Jude's favorite sayings is "The last person you want to be is no one." Being able to share his thoughts and words not only makes him feel like someone but is also a way to shine the light on disabilities and those living with them every day. Jude currently lives with his Mom and Stepdad near Nashville, Tennessee.