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Juanita Torrence-Thompson's latest book, The Secret Life of Scrambled Eggs, is, as the title hints, full of possibility and Torrence-Thompson's characteristic verve. With poems on cellphones and Twitter bumping up against calmer poems of family, love, and life on Mars, it is a book full of surprises, where "today you're rapid French / spoken by a linguist," or where we dine with Ludwig Beethoven on the Champs-Élysées. Particularly arresting in this context are the sudden, more serious lyrics "Place," or the tender "Learning to Speak Tango," or the understated documentation of race relations in "Little Miss Twitchy Pants Tries to Rub the Brown Off." The precise verbal and intellectual tactfulness of these poems fixes them in the mind, and balances, in open-ended dialogue, the surprise and varied texture of the volume as a whole.
— Jeremy M. Downes, Professor of English at Auburn University, President of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, author of Lost Atlas and Poems: Too Small to Read.

Juanita Torrence-Thompson is an explorer of contemporary life in her new book, The Secret Life of Scrambled Eggs. Poems such as "Medusa Rides Train Montreal to New York," "All About You," "After Watching Oprah and Reading Pablo Neruda" and "Dinner with Beethoven," reflect her quick wit and ability to make often humorous leaps. Readers will be taken on an unpredictably satisfying ride.
— Tom McKeown, author The Oceans in the SleepwalkerÂ’s Hands

This is a book that delights and makes us look at the world with the eyes of the poet. Her words sing from the page . . . .
— Lorraine Walker Williams, Author, Split Poems

The poems included in Juanita Torrence Thompson's The Secret Life Of Scrambled Eggs offer fresh, penetrating insight into the daily details which permeate life. Her observations, delivered with eagerness and vitality, highlight minute aspects of toil and joy easily evaporated in the basin of life's complications, reminding the reader to embrace those moments which truly define us. Whether she encounters Beethoven, gives advice to her son, or defines herself with succinct natural images, her diction is direct and descriptive.

7:15 Beethoven/Greeted me as if on time./Delayed by writing his Pastoral Symphony/Couldn't break away/
Between courses/his fingers stretched across/the white tablecloth,/playing the second movement/
Oh Ludwig, I said, I'm HERE!/You asked me out./I could have had ziti/In Queens with Rossini . . . .

By scrutinizing the local, the personal, and the universal, she identifies the underlying significance hidden beneath the mundane and encourages us to confront those instances of glee or desperation with fearlessness and honesty.

(published in Point of View newspaper and online) ”
— Michael Keshigian, author of Eagle'€™s Perch: New & Selected Poems and 6 poetry chapbooks & widely published nationally & internationally. His collection; Lunar Images, was set to music by composer Dennis Leclaire and premiered at Del Mar College in Texas 2010. Boston premiere, 2011 at Berklee College of Music. (michaelkeshigian.com)

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