Overview

Eveningful is interested in thresholds: the sky-smear between night and day, the rift between the speaker's interior mind and the outward world. While evening's movement from day to night is fluid and natural, the speaker finds the act of blending the self with the world--its people, its landscapes, its incidental moments--requires much more deliberate effort. These poems follow the speaker through observations and experiences, often occurring during nighttime, as she navigates two parallel desires: to be seen and understood and also the desire to see more clearly. These desires reveal their complexities. How do we cross the threshold from aloneness to connection? To that end, these poems are concerned with the process of depicting the mind's interior. Each poem is grounded in the mental (and emotional) processes of contemplation and description, exploring the anxieties and realities that make vulnerability difficult for young women. Like turning a ceramic in our hands to ensure all its angles and details are known, the speaker presents various deliberations on connection and solitude, both their dangers and allures. Through this scrutiny and assemblage, Eveningful shows how a self can construct strength and how that strength can bridge thresholds as we work to know and be known. While capturing the movements of a single mind, another layer of these poems is that they often reveal themselves as poems as constructed vessels of experience where the speaker can turn to another, the reader, and perhaps find understanding. Throughout the collection, the speaker shapes and defines the lyric space to explore disclosure and understanding on her own terms. In this way, Eveningful invites the reader's active participation in a very human rhythm: opening ourselves up to another's vulnerability. A process we're lucky to move through again and again--like day melding into night.

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9781736483541

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Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet and educator from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Bodega, The Boiler, Grist, & elsewhere. She received her B.A. from Northern Kentucky University where she studied writing, literature, and film studies. She received her M.F.A. from Texas State University where upon graduation she served as writer-in-residence at the university's Clark House (2015-2016). She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield. Eveningful is her first book.

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