Page 16 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
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S
PRING
2013
POETRY
Winner of the 2013 Four Lakes Poetry Prize
can’t remember a recent book so inhabited by a spirit of unease about where we
find ourselves now. ‘Always in search of the voices,’ Jennifer Boyden writes, and
I can feel her probing for a way to give shape, less to a catalog of our social and
spiritual predicaments than the mood of our times.”—Bob Hicok, author of
The
Legend of Light
The poems in this book inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from
the distance of a few possibilities into the future. In this collection of sharp, hallu-
cinatory, and often darkly humorous poems, a lost man wanders among the towns
of people who can’t remember what they named the children, how to find each
other’s porches, or whether their buildings are still intact. That’s why they need the
person with the loupe. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news,
stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world’s harvest is whatever swims
too close, the person with the loupe steadfastly verifies only what can be mea-
sured, while the lost man is witness to the unquantifiable and the limitless. And
throughout, precise and observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous,
precarious wilderness of
The Declarable Future
.
“From the crystal doorknob transmitters that open
The Declarable Future
to the
last will of the lost man that closes it, I was utterly captivated by the power of
Jennifer Boyden’s parallel world—a timely, disquieting parable for the broken one
in which we live. Her lost man, like Z. Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, becomes an alter ego
who inhabits and interprets our current predicament. Her colloquial language is
lucid, metaphorically inventive, constantly surprising—a rare blend of the piquant
and the quietly tragic.”—Eleanor Wilner, Warren Wilson College
Jennifer Boyden
’s first book,
The Mouths of Grazing
Things
, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 2010.
Her work has appeared in
Folio
,
Orion
,
Gettysburg
Review
, and
The Beloit Poetry Journal
, among others. She
is a recipient of a PEN Northwest Wilderness Writing
Residency and lives on the Oregon coast, where she is a
freelance editor and startup director of a writing and
arts residency dedicated to cross-genre collaborations.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
MARCH
LC: 2012032681 PS
72 PP. 6 X 9
E-BOOK $12.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29213-3
Four Lakes Poetry Series
Ronald Wallace, Series Editor
• Visit
“Here recent scientific break-
throughs collide with intimate
family life, ethereality with the quo-
tidian, and, when we least expect
it, the theoretical plane drops off
suddenly into the abyss of the too,
too real. In these poems of pith
and sizzle, ‘Love [is] finding fleas in
the fur of our sisters.’ Sisters, you
may believe it.”
Nance Van Winckel,
author of
No Starling
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
16
THE UNIVERSIT Y OF WISCONSIN PRESS
•
“In a clear, muscular language loaded with
precise revealing metaphor, Jennifer Boyden
delivers a world. These are poems of a mature
poet deeply engaged with her environment,
demonstrating again and again the power of
language to surprise and delight in moments
of true insight.”—Sam Hamill
Winner of the 2010 Brittingham Prize
in Poetry, selected by Robert Pinsky
PUBLISHED MARCH 2010
LC: 2009039720 PS 118 PP. 6 × 9
E-BOOK $9.99 ISBN 978-0-299-23513-0
