Overview

"Jackie Craven toys with time in WHISH, winner of the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Surreal prose blocks follow the uneasy relationship between a wistful narrator and shape-shifting characters-managers, bookkeepers, secretaries-who manifest as hours of the day. ""It's rare to find such perfect prose poetry,"" says series editor, Tom Lombardo. ""Jackie Craven's abrupt swerves and disruptive metaphors drop readers off cliffs, repeatedly."" Startling, provocative, and darkly comical, WHISH speeds along a ""quantum highway"" where memory and loss plume into stained glass light."

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9781950413782

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Reviews

With Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Star Trek as her muses, Jackie Craven subverts time in WHISH. Employing prose poems, a sonnet in block form, haibun, and lineated verse, she compresses and bends hours and decades and centuries into whizzing, neo-surreal gestures. Anesthesia, death, young love, and infidelity all are destabilized as the speaker looks forward and backwards, as clocks continue to look at the speaker and us. WHISH is a triumph of a book! Jackie Craven has a wholly original voice. -DENISE DUHAMEL, author of Second Story These experimental prose poems and hybrid pieces obsess about the ephemeral nature of time-a Kafkaesque portrait of existence-surreal and strange like Dali's melting clocks. Craven skillfully paints a manic world full of stark and haunting images with an existential echo, always dissecting and magnifying the mundane. If you love the surreal, the experimental, the philosophical, this book of prose poems is for you! Bravo, well done, poet! -JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ, author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American WHISH is a perfect title for these poems that crackle with energy and insight as they explore how time shapes our lives. Time isn't an abstraction here, or an arrow, the poems insist, and summon up the several worlds we live in at once-past, present, and future. Living and dead intermingle, people weave and revise the stories of their lives as if they had all the time in the world-even though the clock is ticking. These poems are brilliant: full of light, sharp and clear in tone. They illuminate what it is to be mortal. -SHARON BRYAN, author of Sharp Stars

Author Information

Jackie Craven writes poetry and prose steeped in magical realism. Recent poems appear in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. She's the author of the collection, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two chapbooks, Cyborg Sister (Headmistress Press) and Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn award for fabulist fiction). After completing a Doctor of Arts from the English Department at UAlbany, she worked for many years as a journalist covering architecture, art, and travel. She lives in Schenectady, New York; Cocoa Beach, Florida; and on Zoom, where she hosts a long-standing open mic for writers.

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