Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Winner of the 2014 Kelsey Street Press FIRSTS! Contest. "Jasmine Dreame Wagner's RINGS spirals through the alphabet with both velocity and precision. To read this poetry is to feel your pulse quicken, for Wagner demonstrates form as energy and imagination. It's not that Wagner deploys her impressive gifts to make a world that coddles or eases the reader. The centrifugal force of her perception is fierce and compels us to acknowledge an innermost lacunae. Still, this is a work of strange jubilation. Wagner renews ruin and memory so that they become responsive. Welcome to the animate labyrinth."—Elizabeth Robinson, contest judge
"Wagner's debut collection is an astounding, labyrinthine, and primordial environment where language is a refreshingly bewildering, alien thing: 'few could see the trees / for the fringe, the forest for its foreign language.' These poems are wild creatures sprawling into one another in a loose alphabetic form that is powerfully exercised, technically masterful, and encyclopedic in its scope."—Publishers Weekly starred review
About the Author
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is the author of RINGS (Kelsey Street Press, 2014), REWILDING (Ahsahta Press, 2013) and Listening for Earthquakes (Caketrain Journal and Press, 2012). Her writing has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, NANO Fiction, New American Writing, Seattle Review, Verse, and in two anthologies: THE ARCADIA PROJECT: NORTH AMERICAN POSTMODERN PASTORAL (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Lost and Found: Stories from New York (Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Books, 2009). A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Montana, Jasmine has received grants and fellowships from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Hall Farm Center for Arts and Education, Summer Literary Seminars-Kenya, and The Wassaic Project. She teaches creative writing at Western Connecticut State University.