An Essay in Asterisks

Poetry. This is the third full-length book of poetry from Jena Osman, following her highly praised work The Character, published by Beacon Press. Osman teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at Temple University in Philadelphia and co-edits the literary arts journal CHAIN with Juliana Spahr. Unimaginable is a word I think of a lot when reading Jena Osman's poetry. Rather like the optical illusion of the face/vase silhoutte, Osman's work proceeds exactly through this process of making the unimaginable obvious, forcing us to rethink the entire project of the poem--and our lives--from the ground up--Ron Silliman.