Leaves In Her Shoes

Poetry. Carol Muske writes, I don't think I've ever read a first book of poems so haunted as THE LEAVES IN HER SHOES. Reading these poems is like listening to snatches of song or overhearing half-sentences, mutterings, broken chants of a lost tribe. J.L. Jacobs assembles these shards into a startling and unforgettable collage. Jacobs' lines are at once broken and whole, hinting at the implicit narratives within the natural world: I am walking on a flat plain./ Here and there, beds of rock-salt.// (Let arrows show how strong the westerly winds.)// I locate by initials:/ A wagonload of flowering bulbs./ A land of bogs and swamps.// You draw lines for water routes (`An error in geography). This is a poetry of voices and of silences... THE LEAVES IN HER SHOES casts a spell, a beautiful spell-Carol Frost.

J.L. Jacobs was born in 1967 in a small town in the rural South. She began her own "project" of collecting folklore, particularly that of womenfolks, at the age of eleven. She did "carry those bug-eaten books out of the barn," and they, along with the Matriarchs she learned from, are woven into her work. She has a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.F.A. in poetry from Brown University. In 1992, Leave Books published her chapbook Varieties of Inflorescence. J.L. Jacobs' work has appeared in many literary journals, including New American Writing, First Intensity, New Orleans Review, Five Fingers Review, and Talisman. She edited the 1995-96 season Of Chance Abstractions. J.L. Jacobs resides in Valliant, Oklahoma.