Synopses & Reviews
Review
“Alison Stine renders landscape with a riveting, almost gothic ferocity. The universe of Wait crackles, burns brightly, while also leading into a darkness of its own. The collection is impressive not just for its immense formal grace, but also for the adamant, forceful desire—its ‘call of skin’—that singes through every poem.”—Maggie Nelson, author of Jane: A Murder
Review
“This poet takes risks: not easy, her originality waits and gives life. In Danziger’s flying language and deep intelligence, here are grief not formalized, joy not smoothed out.”—Jean Valentine, Brittingham Prize judge and National Book Award winner
Review
“Jazzy Danziger is the girl next door of American letters, giving voice to the ordinary with an astonishing grace, language at once elegant and fierce, deft and dazzling. The divergence of her themes electrifies the graceful surfaces of her work with intricacy and desire. Darkroom is a luminous, stunning debut.”—Alice Anderson, author of Human Nature
Review
“These are challenging poems, deeply invested in Danziger’s own self, turned inward. And yet the lyricism, the long casts of memory draw you into the past. Danziger’s chant of her own pain translates into the memories we all have of childhood, as we view her album of adolescence and growth.”—
St. Louis Magazine BlogReview
“Ruthlessly honest and unblinking, the poems in Jazzy Danziger’s debut collection, Darkroom, shimmer on the page.”—Riverfront Times
Review
“In a clear, muscular language loaded with precise revealing metaphor, Jennifer Boyden delivers a world. These are poems of a mature poet deeply engaged with her environment, demonstrating again and again the power of language to surprise and delight in moments of true insight.”—Sam Hamill
Review
“Delightful, that such complexity of mind should be given to us in such lucid packages.”—Albert Goldbarth
Synopsis
In a small town under a spell, a child bride prays for the sheriff’s gun. Iron under a bed stops a nightmare. The carousel artist can carve only birds. Part fairy tale and part gothic ballad, Wait spans a single year: the year before a young woman’s marriage. Someone is always watching—from the warehouse, from the woods. And on the outskirts of town, someone new is waiting.
Synopsis
Part fairy tale, part gothic ballad, Wait chronicles in poems the year before a young girl’s marriage.
Synopsis
In the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, one young woman recognizes the malleability of her reality. From her adolescence in the flat, hot Floridian landscape to a tectonic Missouri adulthood, a girl shaped by grief is compelled to create and manipulate her image of the world. As her dreams become indistinguishable from daily life, she begins to question memory, identity, and the function of love.
Employing photography as its central metaphor, Darkroom tackles the tangled relationship between memory and mourning by exploring an artist’s impossible attempt to re-create the object of loss.
Synopsis
The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature’s forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar is anchored by an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish scattered among the barber’s sweepings, and the players at “the most dangerous playground in the world” prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the now-beyond, the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time.
About the Author
Jennifer Boyden, a Minnesota native, lives in Washington State and teaches literature and writing. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, and The Mid-American Review. Boyden’s awards include the PEN Northwest writing residency and a Washington State Artist Trust Grant. This is her first full-length collection.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Wife
I
Child Bride
Tennessee
The Flood
The Thief
Neighbor
Gossip
Prize-Winning Photograph
The Accident
The Interpreter
Velata
II
The Bicycle
Reelection
The Flies
All the Animals Are Birds
Impetus
Letter after Dismemberment
Perrault's Tale
After the Party
III
Rabbit of the World
The Land
The Ripper's Bride
Salt
Your Marriage
The Interpreter Tries to Blend In
Nothing Happened
Bug
Stepmother
IV
Canary
The Ladder Tree
White Asparagus
Phlox
Clean
Love Letter
The Red Thread
Real Estate
Scissors, Hammer, Hoof Pick, Awl
Hadrian's Wall
Notes