Elizabeth Jacobson
Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize
New Mexico Best Book Award 2019 and Best Poetry Book 2019 (Dec. 2019)
Longlist of Finalists for the Julie Suk Award, best poetry book published by a small or literary press in 2019 (Jacar Press)
Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson
Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-028-2 (paperback, $14.00); 978-1-64317-029-9 (PDF, $9.99). © 2019 by Parlor Press. 101 pages.
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Reviews and Notices
What People Are Saying
“Over the past few years, Elizabeth Jacobson has become one of my favorite American poets. Her work is original, deep, serious, and sensuous in ways that surprise me repeatedly. In the way of true inquiry, Jacobson’s poems unearth genuinely new feelings and knowledge in a clean, mature and fully achieved style. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands. I love this book.” —Tony Hoagland
“This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn’t—to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture—an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems.” —Marianne Boruch
“Snakes, birds, insects, and all manner of strange encounters: Elizabeth Jacobson is a true observer immersed in the natural world. These poems arise out of a deep questioning; they are puzzles, tangled road maps we can’t help but follow. It takes some wisdom to abide, as Jacobson’s work does, so effortlessly in paradox. I am moved to wonder, to breathe and slow down, experiencing how, as she says—the whole world is in me. Through her love of the particular a great expanse opens within us. These are the poems we need and long for right now.” —Anne Marie Macari
Description
Elizabeth Jacobson’s Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker’s intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson’s poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions, like, “Why is human consciousness confused and forgetful?” “What is the distance between nature and ourselves?” “Why is solitary consciousness so rich?” and “Why is transience so immeasurable?” Jacobson’s subject matter, ingenuity, and style invite comparison to the work of some of our most luminous poetic contemporaries, such as Linda Gregg and Jane Hirschfield. Passionate, lucid and meticulous, this collection of poems represents the emergence of a remarkable poet.
About the Author
Elizabeth Jacobson is also the author of Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books) and two chapbooks, Are the Children Make Believe? and A Brown Stone (dancing girl press). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts poetry classes in community shelters in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, Taos Journal of Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Terrain, The Miami Rail, Vox Populi, and other literary journals. She has an MFA from Columbia University.
Contents
I | Birds Eating Cherries from the Very Old Tree | The Cows | I Always Know Where to Put My Hands on a Tree | Next to You, Permanence | Dear Basho, | Mountains Hidden in Mountains | Unyielding Splat | Which Yellow Bird | On the Island of Koshima | Blood Moon | Perfectly Made | Each Day Travelling | On Foot | Blue Reminds Me of the Truth | Violets | II | Curator of Insects | “All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes.” | Enter Here | 14 Love Songs | What Mates Midair: | Just Like That | Infinite Human Motion | Common Octopus | Ant Aubade | Melancholia | Stridulation | The Art of Instinct | The Art of Flight | Hottest Year on Record | Smash Shop | Bad, Bad Bodhisattva | Electrical Storm | III | Lay Hold of Me | Osprey | Basho, | Killing a Turkey at Belle’s | 22 | Mind-Blowing | Long Marriage | Vice Versa | Welcome | Sei, | The Way the Apples Sweeten | Long Marriage | Departure | A Tiny Set of Claws | Suddenly; Rooted | For Most of a Life | IV | Here is a Pilgrim on a Waterless Shore | Refrain | Acknowledgments | Dedications | Notes | About the Author | Free Verse Editions
