"Jane Mead's our Emily Dickinson, our most ambitious solitary. Her austere poems are brilliant: endlessly inventive, syntactically, tonally and emotionally rich. Alternately ironic and undefended, she never sacrifices compassion, justice, her quest for pleasure. In their longing and their loneliness, tending to the otherness of nature, the beauty of expression, these poems honor the frailty that makes us most human."-Ira Sadoff
These lyric elegies, spoken by the "under-self," become a series of subtle chants which sing the speaker into being both physically and spiritually, and through which Mead seeks solace, enlightenment, and joy in the cycles of life and death in the natural world.
From "The Origin":
Twice I have walked through this life-
once for nothing, once
for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool-
glassy-winged sharp-shooter
on the failing vines. Count me-
among the animals, their small
committed calls.-
Count me among
the living. My greatest desire-
to exist in a physical world.
Jane Mead is the author of two previous collections of poetry, House of Poured-Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years the Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages the family ranch in northern California.
