<div class="line">You thought she was your friend</div>
<div class="line">and then you saw her <span style="font-style: italic;">s</span>.</div>
<div class="line">Her lower case <span style="font-style: italic;">i</span>, with the</div>
<div class="line">circle, the actual circle</div>
<div class="line">instead of a dot.</div>
<div class="line"> </div>
<div class="line">Your whole idea of her went</div>
<div class="line">crashing sideways.</div>
<div class="line">She’s not your friend. She would never</div>
<div class="line">have been your friend.</div>
<div class="line"> </div>
<div class="line">She would’ve made fun of you maybe,</div>
<div class="line">or not even noticed you.</div>
<div class="line">Her handwriting says <span style="font-style: italic;">popular girl</span>.</div>
<div class="line">It says <span style="font-style: italic;">sweater set</span>. It says <span style="font-style: italic;">Barbie, Ken, </span></div>
<div class="line"><span style="font-style: italic;">cheerleader, sorority, peacoat.</span></div>
<div class="line"> </div>
<div class="line">It says <span style="font-style: italic;">cruelty</span>. It says <span style="font-style: italic;">mean</span>.</div>
<div class="line">Or rather it says <span style="font-style: italic;">nice</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">nice</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">nice</span>.</div>
<div class="line">And maybe she hid behind it.</div>
<div class="line">And maybe she grew out of it,</div>
<div class="line">or would have, if she’d had time.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/RandallPlath.mp3"></audio></figure>

Walls Trembling Like Horses

Neon Shades of Youth

Sylvia Plath’s Handwriting

To My Wife (in the Kitchen Attempting Pancakes)

Harbinger

from The Baby Hygiene Series

<p><em>Review by Sandra Knauf</em><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/randallcows.jpg" alt="Injecting Dreams into Cows by Jessy Randall" align="right" /></p>
<p><small>Red Hen Press<br />
P. O. Box 40820<br />
Pasadena, California 91114<br />
ISBN: 978-1-59709-230-2<br />
2012, 101 pp., $17.95<br />
<a href="http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=A946F397-7A28-63C7-3B91-74156027CFBD">www.redhen.org</a></small></p>
<blockquote><p>“It has poems about video games, Pippi Longstocking, and phone sex, but not all at the same time.”<br />
—Jessy Randall, describing <em>Injecting Dreams Into Cows</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Jessy Randall’s second book of poetry does have all of the above, as well as poems on the Muppets, robots, and a dreamy verse about an imaginary lover with “leaf-strewn coat” and “bagel-studded eyes.” She’s a poet who delights in playing with and surprising her readers, and I imagine that she also has fun keeping readers guessing what she’s all about.</p>
<p>Is she “The Librarian” whose professed sorrow comes from&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Always having<br />
The wrong information:</p>
<p>Knowing that Shirley Jackson’s mother<br />
had an uncanny ability to find four leaf clovers</p>
<p>And that Shirley Jackson herself<br />
believed she could summon particular utensils<br />
by slamming her kitchen drawer</p>
<p>HARD</p></blockquote>
<p>Or, perhaps, is she the outraged art aficionado who (ultimately and wistfully) wishes Robert Rauschenberg would steal something of hers in “A Liar and a Thief”:</p>
<blockquote><p>Sometimes Rauschenberg says<br />
he used the quilt because he<br />
ran out of canvas. Sometimes<br />
he says it was more deliberate</p>
<p>Either way, he stole the quilt<br />
out of a North Carolina washing<br />
machine from a girl he barely<br />
knew, and never told her. He’s<br />
a liar and a thief!</p></blockquote>
<p>Or, is she really, underneath it all, a comic? How could she not be with a poem titled “One Day, The Ass-Talker Stopped Talking Out of His Ass”?</p>
<p>Of course, like all multifaceted and brilliant women artists she’s all of the above—and more. Her scope is kaleidoscopic. She treasures and shares found poems. She digs deep and uses all the emotions in the crayon box—and we love her for it. She’s the wordsmith/prankster who examines (what else?) in “Metaphors.”</p>
<blockquote><p>A duck is like the moon<br />
Because a kid can point at both. A house<br />
Is like the sky: both hold things. My heart<br />
Is like your heart because both are hearts.</p></blockquote>
<p>Randall takes “brevity is the soul of wit” seriously in more than one of her works, including the eight word “Emergency Sexuality” and the short and sharp “They Make a Movie of Themselves.”</p>
<p>At times, Randall’s second collection feels like a romp (and a continuation of her first book of poetry, <em>Days in Boyland</em>), and it certainly is, but the poems that grab the reader emotionally are those which reveal Randall’s heart. In this collection, Randall the wit, the librarian, and the playful lover is also a mother who has stayed up all night with her young, vomiting son (“My Son, When He is Sick”)  and a parent who reveals the emotional payload of “Deciding to Have a Second Child.” She’s also the wife who sees matrimony as a pairing of the strangest bedfellows ever in the poignant and hilarious “Cavewoman and the Spaceman”:</p>
<blockquote><p>Can you believe we’ve had two children together? Asked the<br />
caveman. The spacewoman remained silent, her helmet hiding<br />
her expression. Milked leaked through the top of her astronaut suit.<br />
The caveman asked if he could have the rest of the spacewoman’s<br />
pork chop. She passed it to him and he gnawed at the bone.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, there’s a miles-wide gap between these parents (as child-rearing will illuminate in any couple) but Randall softens it and renders it endearing through her humor.</p>
<p>Her prose poem “Why I Had Children,” wrought with tenderness and honesty and eloquence (and amazing brevity, in just four sentences), is the best poem I have read on parenthood.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Why I Had Children</strong></p>
<p>Because I was reading too many books and getting too much sleep and my self-esteem was too high. Because I needed to be taken down a peg. Because I thought love was one thing and really it’s another. Because I thought I knew everything about everything and I didn’t know anything, not anything in the world.</p></blockquote>
<p>I delight in Randall’s playfulness and her fascinations, but it’s the depth of her tender emotions that resonates with me. Probably a third of the book contains poems of this kind, and if there is one criticism of this extraordinary work it would be my own wish that Randall bring these more serious poems into a collection some day.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
</blockquote>


Amerika, Mon Amour (2003)

The Henchman’s Knot

INJECTING DREAMS INTO COWS

<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>JESSY RANDALL</strong>: “I first discovered poetry comics when I inventoried Kenneth Koch’s papers for the New York Public Library in 1995. Koch had done hundreds of poetry comics, some of which were later published in <em>The Art of the Possible</em> (Soft Skull Press, 2004). I loved the idea of these ‘comics mainly without pictures,’ as Koch described them, and tried to make a few of my own. Some, like these two, were also influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (Macmillan, 1896).”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">[audioplayer file=&#8221;https://admin.rattle.com/audio/RandallPC1.mp3&#8243;]</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" style="vertical-align: middle;" src="https://admin.rattle.com/rattle29/randall1.jpg" alt="Poetry Comic #1" width="400" height="289" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">[audioplayer file=&#8221;https://admin.rattle.com/audio/RandallPC2.mp3&#8243;]</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/rattle29/randall2.jpg" alt="Poetry Comic #2" width="400" height="250" /></p>


Shopping Cart
items

May 11, 2016from The Baby Hygiene SeriesJessy Randall

Sign up for our Newsletter

May 11, 2016from The Baby Hygiene SeriesJessy Randall

Related

Sylvia Plath’s Handwriting by Jessy Randall

INJECTING DREAMS INTO COWS by Jessy Randall

Poetry Comics by Jessy Randall