Bøger af Jennifer Macbain-Stephens

In a post pandemic world, how do we rebuild what is broken? Pool Parties dives into dinosaurs, pop culture, hospital beds, barnacles, geology, and the soil of the midwest to dig through and sift our aching to heal psyche. Found poems about crystals, Sabrina the teenage witch, and building trails are just some of the topics of these playful yet sometimes dark poems. Once shielding ourselves from the world in tiny boxes, we now long to break the glass, feel the sun, and one another, but it is scary. Try to connect we must, if we fail, we must fail better. What rooms are our safe spaces? What woods? From Ranch for Sale, As is: "In the god trees you disappeared into Port wine and too many off ramp brown eye role playing games. My heart in a 1960s ranch style basement. Thought you'd come in, shake out the red and white checkered tablecloth, pull aside the daisy patterned curtains." MacBain-Stephens invites us to dive into the deep end of the pool where it is always too cold at first. We don't trust our own pleas for help and need a third operator to repeat our words back to us: "the operator whispers / plays the soundtrack to the The Third Man / listens in, but this isn't Orson Welles in black and white beauty..." (from The Telephone Operator Knows When to Plug in.) Pool Parties is a delicious awkward visit to that place you left too quickly, just when it was getting interesting.

An endangered antelope discovers, "There is no need to butcher you anymore." A stuntwoman considers ending it all. Violent swans challenge stereotypes. In We're Going to Need a Higher Fence, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens again shows her ability to immerse readers in reoccurring microcosms, whether they contain people in surreal correspondence, feather and fauna, or a buzzing-mouth monster under your bed. No matter the scene, MacBain-Stephens' imbues her cast of masks with heart and wild, unexpected lyricism. -Christopher Morgan, Co-Manager of Nostrovia! Press and author of To Breathe Deep In We're Going to Need a Higher Fence, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens presents a necropastoral that is challenged by ways of seeing: "In your torso, / my eyes radiate chartreuse / My chin lavender, / My parka disintegrates into / diamond suns. Here, fragmentation is a kind of solace, an answer that keeps rendering a hopeful speaker: Let me remain unburied, unburned." While little seems safe in this landscape of oil sealed third eyes and one winged angels, language remains crisp and clear; these poems are, to a reader, such fine offerings.--Nicole Tong, author of How to Prove a Theory

From Joan of Arc to Man Ray and Jenny Holzer, Jennifer MacBain Stephens' luminous poems work through the art and warfare of skin and sacrifice, film and fantasy. Urgent and surreal, political and personal, The Messenger is Already Dead is an essential contemporary collection from an acclaimed poet.