Description

Roof Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2022

Publisher Marketing: A new collection from multi-award-winner poet Jean Day.

THE NIGHT BEFORE … begins with the women’s marches of 2016, follows with an east-to-west road trip across the US, and finally arrives at a meditation on mourning. If this sounds like an itinerary, it’s not; the poems are, rather, instances of shimmer in the continuous present. Threads of story, macro and mini, form the warp for the book’s overall texture. The sound of resistance, the urgency of movement, and the flowering of detail are the book’s matter and material. Lyric is its shape.

The linked poems in Jean Day’s THE NIGHT BEFORE THE DAY ON WHICH are a road trip through an America and Americana gone haywire. This book is a figurative visit to the parched Badlands of the 21st century where ‘We’ve watched/so many crop shows come and go/we know the drill until the droop…’ Day nails the zeitgeist in surprising ways again and again–no easy feat! Even in dystopia there is the thrill of recognition.–Rae Armantrout