Synopses & Reviews
Jessica Fisherand#8217;s Frail-Craft is winner of the 2006 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and judge Louise Gland#252;ckand#8217;s fourth selection for the series. The book and the dream are the poetand#8217;s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilitiesand#8212;the frail craftand#8212;of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that and#8220;if the eye can loveand#8212;and it can, it doesand#8212;then I held you and was held.and#8221; In her foreword to the book, Louise Gland#252;ck writes that Fisherand#8217;s poetry is and#8220;haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.and#8221;
Review
"Reading Jessica Fisher's first collection of poetry is like wandering through a garden of forking paths that at times give suddenly, astonishingly, onto the sea. . . . Extraordinary. . . . These poems are reminders of how great a burden their frail craft can bear."and#8212;Boston Review
Synopsis
Jessica Fisher’s Frail-Craft is Louise Glück’s fourth selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary prize in the United States. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, the poet meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes, “What gives Jessica Fisher’s work its sense of form, of repose, is her perfection of ear. That repose, with its strange mobility, its accommodation of surprise, is Fisher’s particular genius. To enter these poems is to be suspended in them: like dreams, they both surround and elude.”
About the Author
Jessica Fisher is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California at Berkeley. She is coeditor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street Anthology. She lives in Oakland.