Description

Headmistress Press, paperback

Publication Date: January 25, 2021

The poet Jessica Jopp has an eye (and heart) for color and landscape: trees, fields, rivers vividly evoked. She also has a way of mixing earth and heaven, the sun lighting up the earth and the moon illuminating its darkness. This artfulness allows her to develop her narratives, long poems broken up into many sections, in moving ways. Her stories record both joy and grief, the promises of life and the loss of loved ones whom death takes away, though memory and poems bring them back again and again.
-Emily Grosholz, author ofThe Stars of Earth

Mesmerizing, at times magical, consistently moving, this book is essentially one long poem that flows, nearly seamlessly, as a river might or as wind in a field of tall grasses. The reader is carried into the deep time of a particularly sensuous mind that can present the vivid particulars of the moment and, as deftly, plumb the silences and dark nights of loss and grief which resist language. Over and over, Jopp offers words that re-member mother, father, sisters, and in particular, a friend: a beloved who has died and whose death has set in motion a quest of the imagination. Ordinarily in the course of grieving, we learn to “let go.” But word by word, this wonderful poet creates imaginal strategies of heart and mind that allow her to remain earthbound, life-bound, love-bound in the wake of death and loss. The result is a triumph of the imagination.
-Margaret Gibson, Connecticut State Poet Laureate and author ofBroken Cup, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush

My students and I love Jessica Jopp’s poetry because we can so clearly see the images her words conjure, and because we slip into her worlds effortlessly, and later emerge with a new knowledge of what is meaningful to each of us. As you read Jessica’s gorgeous, haunting poetry, you, too, will experience the ordinary becoming the fantastic, and you will hear faint music playing somewhere inside the words.
-Judith Villa, professor of English