Night at the Musée d'Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Wells' appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Although beauty is Wells' major theme in her poetry collection, she also delves into the darker side of various artists' lives and their works with depth and precision. In conjunction, Wells interweaves her own personal life into her travel poems, which illustrate her creative and emotional responses to her travels at different times in her life-from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging and mortality in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles-lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, even haiku. Night at the Musée d'Orsay contains five sections: The first section, France , highlights artists in Paris-Van Gogh, Chagall, Renoir, Matisse and novelist Balzac. Italy , the second chapter, features poems about Rome, Orvieto, and Assisi, spotlighting contemporary organist Giampaolo Di Rosa in Rome, and Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli in Orvieto. The third section, Austria , contains poems on musicians Amadeus Mozart and his sister Nannerl, the architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and contemporary light artist Victoria Coeln, all in Vienna. The Czech Republic , the fourth chapter, features poems on the Renaissance and baroque city, Český Krumlov, and Franz Kafka in Prague. The final section, Spain , visits the Prado in Madrid with poems on Velázquez and Goya, and ends with a long poem on the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and his still incomplete sacred temple in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familía. The first voice we hear in Judy Wells' Night at the Musée d'Orsay is that of a moth who confesses to spending the night in ecstasy on the painted "yellow globs" of Van Gogh's stars, "reflected in a river." This humble, soulful art lover sets the tone for Wells' delightful collection of travel poems. Beauty awes her. She can swing from an ecstatic response to loveliness to an agonized response to suffering. Her contemplation of Matisse's Icarus on a T-shirt is broken by gunfire in Oakland, "and Black Icarus/ lies in a pool of/ brilliant red/ day/ after day." She moves us from laughter to tears. -Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Faust Woman Poems and The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung With a perceptive and whimsical wit, Judy Wells takes us on a tour of some of Europe's well-known art, artists, and their histories. Beneath the delightful surface there are glimmers of what might belie art's promise of an immortal world where beauty rules; yet these shadows give an edge to the joie de vivre found on every page here. -Olivia Eielson, artist and writer It's a treat to immerse yourself in Wells' poems in Night at the Musée d'Orsay , rich with life, color, and memory. She creates a wraparound mood of discovery, excitation, optimism, and the youthful joy of seeing for the first time those famous paintings, those foreign streets, a civilization freshly seen and intimately embraced. -Kathleen Weaver, poet, translator, and author of Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal. When Wells takes on the persona of the artist, the maker, the creator, in Night at the Musée d'Orsay , she encourages us to believe that anyone can take flight and soar off to new visions in an experiment in time, space, and verbal jouissance that is poetry and life itself! -Bridget Connelly, author of Forgetting Ireland JUDY WELLS is a fourth generation San Francisco Bay Area Californian. She received her B.A. in French from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. She has twelve previous poetry books to her credit, including her exploration of her maternal Irish roots in her trilogy, Everything Irish and Call Home (Scarlet Tanager Books) and The Glass Ship (Sugartown Publishing). Her most recent collection, Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West (Sugartown), is a poetry/memoir about her paternal great-grandmother and her sisters, who came out to California in the early 1860s from Massachusetts to be pioneer schoolteachers. Judy's research revealed she is indeed a distant cousin of Emily Dickinson.Judy has read her poetry in many venues-from the famed bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris to the famed, now closed Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. She has also been a featured reader in several Berkeley Poetry Festivals. Her poetry has appeared in Veils, Halos, and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women; Women Write Resistance; Berkeley Times; San Francisco Peace and Hope; California Quarterly; Marin Poetry Center Anthology; Stanford Alumni Magazine; Psychological Perspectives; Persimmon Tree; Timberline Review; Levure littéraire; Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry and in many other journals. She is also