Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2014 Fence Modern Poets Series.
Jennifer Mackenzie's debut is an unfettered travelogue of embodied intellect and flights of gorgeous observance.
Go hang yourself
in the light undestroyed
tourist in the tremor of
a dirty window this is the famous
border we're coming up on hidden from
ourselves like the hunter whose sudden
antlers implied the death of self
in love No you shut up
) (
[That all good poetry is the poetry of exile]
is bullshit, I belong to my body and try
desperately and stubbornly to unknow it
The Individual distilled into
Outspoken by Fergie
Synopsis
2014 Fence Modern Poets Series winner Jennifer Mackenzies debut is a travelogue of embodied intellect and flights of gorgeous observance.
About the Author
Jennifer MacKenzie grew up in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and was educated at Wesleyan University's College of Letters and the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Verse, Quarterly West, Lungfull, Shampoo, and Handsome, and her reviews and other literary non-fiction in the Near East Quarterly, Killing the Buddha and the Kenyon Review Online. She has worked as a barista and oral historian in Duvall, WA, as an adjunct composition instructor in San Francisco, CA, and Portland, OR, and as an English teacher, journalist and editor (until October 2012) of the now-defunct magazine Syria Today in Damascus, Syria. Until recently she was based in Istanbul, Turkey, where she taught English, co-translated Arabic poetry, and wrote sporadic prose on Syria; she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Table of Contents
Where Are You Going
Silver Car 1
You Are Not a Bird 2
My John Wayne 3
All Dread Is Trying To Be Kind 4
Pharaoh Glimmer 5
My Explanation of
My Explanation of Poetry for My Not-My Soldier 15
Black Mercedes Novel 16
Confessional Poem 18
On Hue 19
Small White Bed 21
Isabella in the Tower of Winds 41
Notebook Interrupted by a Trip
to the Hospital 49
Indiscrete Leviathan 59
Blurbing the Reconquista 67
The Dead Girl 75
Wartime Garden
My Name Is Raji 87
Virgin vs. Non-Virgin Ghazals 88
School of Gypsy Fountains 89
Airy Dregs 92
Fake Boat 94
Now Duly We 96
Embedded Pastoral Curse 97
What Happens on the Moon 98
Soliloquizer 99
Damascus
Dime-Store Travelogue 103
Dear Dead 104
The Derivation of the Word Sultan 106
The Dream of the Fountain 108
Thank You James Blunt for Your Input 111
Odysseus Wept 112
Gaping Queen 114
Dispatch 115
Postcard to the Angel Jibreel 117
Distant City 118