Overview

In Good Job, Jessica Farquhar maps the overlapping terrains of motherhood, artmaking, and professional life, examining how worth becomes entangled with visibility and the necessity of putting oneself out there. ""I am sleepy, but I keep telling myself / I have to wake up and make friends with these people. Good Job is the name of this dream."" With language both startling and tender, Farquhar illuminates the hidden economies of daily life-from the body's wisdom in expressing milk to the arithmetic of self-worth. The title's triple resonance-parental praise, employment security, and artistic achievement-threads through poems that refuse easy answers about what constitutes meaningful work. Good Job charts the speaker's journey out from the shadows toward a fierce claiming of space and voice.

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Reviews

A book of double-takes, the poet wills herself and her readers to take notice, to find and make meaning, and to find permission and courage to un-make modes of thinking and being that fail us. Amidst the tyranny of money and technology, in a time in which ""[t]he end of the world is taking so long,"" in which Siri (and thus perhaps we, too) ""doesn't know the difference"" between ""Good morning, good money,"" poetry might activate the glitch that disrupts domesticating systems in order to re-feral the mind and unburden us of our tameness. The work of living might well benefit from nurturing our capacities to experience amazement and awe. The oft-staggered couplets of Jessica Farquhar's Good Job enact a back and forth the words and images also negotiate, testing out competing propositions that poetry is a balm versus that poetry is language, inflamed. The poet's refusal to find resolution where there is none is part of the good work (if also the enduring ache) of these poems. - Kristi Maxwell, Author of Wide Ass of Night Reading Jessica Farquhar's Good Job is like walking into a motorcycle shop run by a Jungian doula. A little deadpan, a bit witchy, the speaker in these poems doles out frank assessments-""I cannot keep my opinions // to myself,"" she admits. ""I am pretty good at breathing."" Such directness, however, never precludes mystery. These are work songs, but labor in all forms requires too its dreams and moonscapes. Here is the work of writing, of birth, of mothering, the work that leads to ""good money"" and to the magic and disasters strewn along the road to a good life. I would follow this music, this voice anywhere. ""I'd rather / ask for nothing than / permission,"" Farquhar writes. Thank god she doesn't ask. - Corey Van Landingham, Author of Reader, I

Author Information

Jessica Farquhar's previous collection is the chapbook Dear Motorcycle Enthusiast (The Magnificent Field Press). Her recent work appears in Autocorrect, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Red Branch Review, Sarabande's Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology, and You Blew It: A Miracle Monocle Micro-anthology. A recipient of grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she holds an MFA from Purdue University, where she served as assistant director of the Creative Writing program. She is a founding member of the Sublimity City poetry collective based in Louisville, Kentucky.

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