<div class="line">You near and wave the wan evacuees</div>
<div class="line">enough to get them back to Jackson Square</div>
<div class="line">with bellies full of bagels and cream cheese.</div>
<div class="line">The sweat-soaked husband can’t return your stare,</div>
<div class="line">their compact packed to bursting with the most</div>
<div class="line">his wife and kids were able to finagle</div>
<div class="line">before the hurricane could hit the coast.</div>
<div class="line">But gas is choice as gold, and that cheese bagel</div>
<div class="line">is higher than when you and I were stranded</div>
<div class="line">in similar surroundings. We just hope</div>
<div class="line">his damage doesn’t match what we were handed.</div>
<div class="line">The hardest part is how we watch him mope,</div>
<div class="line">and pass the bland, non-Cajun styrofoam</div>
<div class="line">container through her window, heading home.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/ReeserHomeless.mp3"></audio></figure>

Smoke

Poets Respond

Lions Roar

A Homeless Traveling Statesman

<div class="line">A massive star without a trace</div>
<div class="line">    Has died away, as most things must.</div>
<div class="line">No fond farewell for us from space,</div>
<div class="line">    A massive star without a trace</div>
<div class="line">Distills the skill to self-efface.</div>
<div class="line">    Black hole? Dimmed in a cloud of dust?</div>
<div class="line">A massive star without a trace</div>
<div class="line">Has died away, as most things must.</div>
<figure id="attachment_32318" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32318" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://youtu.be/PaDJ0eqQh9s"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-32318" src="https://admin.rattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OpenMicforFBtopS.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="675" srcset="https://admin.rattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OpenMicforFBtopS.jpg 1200w, https://admin.rattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OpenMicforFBtopS-600x338.jpg 600w, https://admin.rattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OpenMicforFBtopS-300x169.jpg 300w, https://admin.rattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OpenMicforFBtopS-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://admin.rattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OpenMicforFBtopS-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-32318" class="wp-caption-text">Join us this morning for Poets Respond Live! <a href="https://youtu.be/PaDJ0eqQh9s">Click here</a> to watch …</figcaption></figure><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/ReeserStar.mp3"></audio></figure>

Fool Invents the Piano, 1250 A.D.

Writing Poems on Zoom with My Grandchildren

Scientists Panicked by Vanished Star

<div class="line">As I unload each shifting, fertile clod</div>
<div class="line">upon her pale remains, their thudding sound</div>
<div class="line">brings to mind the pounding of that sod</div>
<div class="line">upon my mother’s final resting ground.</div>
<div class="line">Mother Earth, obliging, falls apart</div>
<div class="line">for me. I see, instead of her I bested,</div>
<div class="line">that sweet, blonde thief who cut my mother’s heart,</div>
<div class="line">the one whom—all my life—I have detested.</div>
<div class="line">What were the odds, that I could shoot ahead</div>
<div class="line">of her, this daughter of the Nordic gods?</div>
<div class="line">This educated harlot once struck dread</div>
<div class="line">within me—puzzlingly. What were the odds?</div>
<div class="line">If I can leave the thrill of her foul mouth</div>
<div class="line">filled with my Mother’s milk, I’ll migrate south …</div>


Late Sonogram

They Say We Make Our Horses Run

Strong Feather Buries the White Woman

<div class="line">The evidence, for me, lies in the pains</div>
<div class="line">Displayed upon their furrowed, worried faces</div>
<div class="line">As I explore the corpse, but find no traces,</div>
<div class="line">Tasked with analyzing the remains.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line"><em>Hold it together, Doctor, keep your cool.</em></div>
<div class="line">Here comes the part no scientist enjoys:</div>
<div class="line">“These skeletons are not your missing boys</div>
<div class="line">Exhumed at Richard Henry Indian School.”</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">I feel I lack—like them—the heart, the liver,</div>
<div class="line">Life-granting, vital fluids—bile and gall;</div>
<div class="line">No word of cure nor ceremonial shawl;</div>
<div class="line">Removed, returned, re-buried at Wind River.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/ReeserForensic.mp3"></audio></figure>

Promotion to Outside Resources in Marion Mental Hospital

Long Car Line Prayer

A Forensic Anthropologist Breaks Bad News to the Arapaho

<p><em>Review by Jenn Ruckel</em></p>
<p><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/reesersonnets.jpg" alt="Sonnets from the Dark Lady by Jennifer Reeser" align="right" /><br />
<small>Saint James Infirmary Books<br />
ISBN-13 978-0615589503<br />
2012, 148 pp., $13.48<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sonnets-Dark-Lady-Other-Poems/dp/0615589502/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1338774040&amp;sr=1-1-catcorr">www.amazon.com</a></small></p>
<p>Compelling and metrically confident, Jennifer Reeser’s third book is a compilation of twenty-seven poems written from the perspective of the Dark Lady to whom Shakespeare addresses sonnets 127–152. The rest of the book&#8211;seventy poems in all&#8211;touches on a variety of subjects, from translations of Baudelaire to lyrical love poems and even poems to the author’s cat, with Reeser’s poems on New Orleans’ French Quarter especially memorable. The winner of Word Press’s first book prize and a widely published poet in formalist circles, Reeser offers surprising language and an often playful tone in this accessible, engaging collection.</p>
<p>Following an epigraph from Heraclitus, “Blind Concessions” presents a striking portrait of the Sibyl. Although working now at a pastry stand, she still sees much, despite her blindness, and the poem explores the extent of this sensitive perception: “[A]s motions go, / hers have the kind of clarity the seeing / could envy: that excess, that overflow / inherent in the bearing born of being.” This Sibyl does not need ordinary vision to function in the world or to perceive what lies beyond it. Here, too, Reeser demonstrates her talent for vivid, fresh description, her ability to condense an image to its essentials within meter and rhyme’s constraints: “Sightless Sibyl at the pastry stand / wears white, and with a checkered terry towel / wipes down the counter with one wrinkled hand.” A few lines are all Reeser needs to provide insight into a character or moment.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, Reeser draws from literary forebears. In “because the cut your presence,” for example, Reeser adopts the typography and techniques of e.e. cummings, experimenting with form and unconventional syntax. From her first two lines&#8211;“because the cut your presence is to ache / to ache {oh no one else no no one none}”&#8211;Reeser uses punctuation and repetition to create a forceful rhythm that pushes the poem forward. Much more than a formal experiment, the poem traces how hearts may break so beautifully&#8211;how pain and love overlap in many relationships. Through wit and honesty, Reeser achieves insight into human experience and emotional ambivalence.</p>
<p>Of course, the collection’s title makes Reeser’s “Dark Lady” sequence the central focus of the book. In these poems, the poet uses archaic language in a way that reflects reverence for the original text of Shakespeare’s sonnets, while introducing new life and a new intensity to an established style. Her sonnets in the persona of the Dark Lady offer a direct response to Shakespeare, utilizing the same techniques Shakespeare himself was famous for&#8211;his wit and ability to distill complex thinking into just a few words&#8211;but with a female perspective. In the neat quatrains of her reply to “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” Reeser observes, “No braggart sagas follow his devotions; / His myths are masked, reported visions few,” thus providing the lover’s view of the man who courted her. The Dark Lady observes further:</p>
<blockquote><p>Many a diva gets her burning word,<br />
Chocolate oblations brandied, blessed, hot-toddied.<br />
I have for heat the hidden and unheard,<br />
An incandescent, backwards disembodied,<br />
And would — for naught and nothing — make a trade<br />
For pageants staged within him, well-displayed.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here, Reeser imagines the Dark Lady’s response to what Shakespeare was writing about her. She does not want the “pageants staged within him,” as Shakespeare himself did not want anything other than the Dark Lady’s true self in his original; yet she also acknowledges the power of what is <em>not</em> seen: herself, the lady literally in darkness, and those passions that she conceals (except in private) but which remain “incandescent.” In this sequence, and in the rest of her extensive, wide-ranging collection, Reeser ably demonstrates why she is one of the most admired of today’s younger poets writing in rhyme and meter.</p>
<blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p></blockquote>


Jubilate Samsara

On Being Invited to Submit Poems ‘Written in the Manner of the Ancient Chinese Mountain Recluse Poets’

SONNETS FROM THE DARK LADY AND OTHER POEMS

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July 5, 2020Jennifer ReeserScientists Panicked by Vanished Star

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July 5, 2020Jennifer ReeserScientists Panicked by Vanished Star

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A Homeless Traveling Statesman by Jennifer Reeser

Strong Feather Buries the White Woman by Jennifer Reeser

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SONNETS FROM THE DARK LADY AND OTHER POEMS by Jennifer Reeser