Overview

Winner of the Finishing Line Press 2019 Chapbook Competition, this sharply observant, powerful poetry collection explores the mysteries of connection and loss: the ways we co-exist, love, and leave. Leaping and swerving, Jody Winer's poems move across centuries and species: from an alligator farm lake to the moon's dry seas, from a stalled subway car to a 7-Eleven parking lot, from the garden of Eden to a burnt apple orchard. Welcome to guardian angel school: ""Expect scant correlation between love and safety."" The nation is haunted by ""flickering strip malls and the Rust Belt's forlorn fortresses."" We are expert at denial: ""Though we know what's missing/our eyes still see complete trees. To live/we self-deceive."" Grief ""makes you write/your dead friend's name on the grocery list."" What to do? These poems implore us to be curious, ask questions, pay attention. As any student should. Big answers are scarce, but small signs of hope abound. Light shines through dark times: ""infrared visible ultraviolet X/raiser of spirits.... our daily bread sign of warm bed/and someone home."" Death looms, but so does love: ""As hours kill, chimes make fireworks."" Imagination transforms: ""There's still time./No end to invented light."" So why not ""Picture a Mount Rushmore for Women""?

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9781646621415

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Reviews

""In these elegiac, highly readable poems, Jody Winer's steady, skeptical eye teases out the distinction between memory and fact, between art and illusion, that orders her orbit through city, countryside, friendship, and marriage....Like Elizabeth Bishop, Winer is primarily concerned with how perception both distorts and connects."" -Julie Sheehan, author of Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise (W.W. Norton) and Orient Point (W.W. Norton) ""A miraculous and accomplished debut....'The Creature Grief' is visceral throughout this collection...Playfulness, and an irresistible delight in language, temper Winer's soberer themes."" -Grace Bonner, author of Round Lake (Four Way Books) and The Book of Atlantis Black (Tin House, forthcoming)

In these elegiac, highly readable poems, Jody Winer's steady, skeptical eye teases out the distinction between memory and fact, between art and illusion, that orders her orbit through city, countryside, friendship, and marriage....Like Elizabeth Bishop, Winer is primarily concerned with how perception both distorts and connects. -Julie Sheehan, author of Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise (W.W. Norton) and Orient Point (W.W. Norton) A miraculous and accomplished debut....'The Creature Grief' is visceral throughout this collection...Playfulness, and an irresistible delight in language, temper Winer's soberer themes. -Grace Bonner, author of Round Lake (Four Way Books) and The Book of Atlantis Black (Tin House, forthcoming)

Author Information

Jody Winer is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have appeared in Epoch, The Massachusetts Review, Open City, Phoebe, Poet Lore, The South Carolina Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, and other journals. She has worked as a librarian, writer, and dog wrangler. She holds an MA from the University of Kent, Canterbury, England; an MLS from Simmons College; and a BA from Pomona College-and was a Trustee Scholar at the University of Chicago. Raised in Florida, she lives in New York.

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