Overview

In her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist. These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson's poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.

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Reviews

""Jackson's first husband died by suicide, and her stunning metaphors are honed by a profound understanding of grief, and of the symbiotic relationship between life and death. Through close observation of birds, landscapes, sunrises, sunsets, and the night sky, among other natural phenomena, the poet draws attention to the beauty that surrounds us, a reminder that it's possible to heal after a painful loss."" —Poetry Foundation “Didi Jackson’s My Infinity is an infinitely expansive collection with an acute sensitivity to the infinitesimal, ‘the small thump’ of a goldfinch hitting the window, ‘the flash of gold / against the mica sky // as the limp feathered envelope / crumples into the green.’ The magnitude of the sorrows these poems address is harmonized by, and filtered through, a ravishing network of the deeply witnessed particularities, the holy details, of the natural world. Bringing sweep and texture and experimental energy to the collection are boldly imagined ekphrastic poems, originating from the work of Swedish abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint. These poems unbolt a portal, allowing Jackson to access her own visionary powers, the language of ‘hunger and awe.’ The result is a poetry so alive that it has the capacity to cradle the dead, to offer a ‘mercy that strips us naked to each other.’ I am moved and transformed by Didi Jackson’s infinity.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry “In the beautifully rendered book of poems, My Infinity by Didi Jackson, the speaker’s voice is meditative, pensive, and warm. Tonally, these poems represent that time of day which is near dusk and twilight, when the day is mostly finished, but is scarred with too much knowledge. My Infinity grapples with the aftermath of a lover’s suicide, alongside new love and joy. Whether it is corresponding with the visual art of Hilma af Klint or the natural world, nothing is too small for this speaker to look at, as with a microscope, and correspond with, as one might correspond with the moon. Here is a poet of witness of awe alongside the music of pain and grief, and of the ‘mercy that strips us naked to each other.’” —Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT

"""Didi Jackson's My Infinity is an infinitely expansive collection with an acute sensitivity to the infinitesimal, 'the small thump' of a goldfinch hitting the window, 'the flash of gold / against the mica sky // as the limp feathered envelope / crumples into the green.' The magnitude of the sorrows these poems address is harmonized by, and filtered through, a ravishing network of the deeply witnessed particularities, the holy details, of the natural world. Bringing sweep and texture and experimental energy to the collection are boldly imagined ekphrastic poems, originating from the work of Swedish abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint. These poems unbolt a portal, allowing Jackson to access her own visionary powers, the language of 'hunger and awe.' The result is a poetry so alive that it has the capacity to cradle the dead, to offer a 'mercy that strips us naked to each other.' I am moved and transformed by Didi Jackson's infinity."" --Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry ""In the beautifully rendered book of poems, My Infinity by Didi Jackson, the speaker's voice is meditative, pensive, and warm. Tonally, these poems represent that time of day which is near dusk and twilight, when the day is mostly finished, but is scarred with too much knowledge. My Infinity grapples with the aftermath of a lover's suicide, alongside new love and joy. Whether it is corresponding with the visual art of Hilma af Klint or the natural world, nothing is too small for this speaker to look at, as with a microscope, and correspond with, as one might correspond with the moon. Here is a poet of witness of awe alongside the music of pain and grief, and of the 'mercy that strips us naked to each other.'"" --Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT"

“Didi Jackson’s My Infinity is an infinitely expansive collection with an acute sensitivity to the infinitesimal, ‘the small thump’ of a goldfinch hitting the window, ‘the flash of gold / against the mica sky // as the limp feathered envelope / crumples into the green.’ The magnitude of the sorrows these poems address is harmonized by, and filtered through, a ravishing network of the deeply witnessed particularities, the holy details, of the natural world. Bringing sweep and texture and experimental energy to the collection are boldly imagined ekphrastic poems, originating from the work of Swedish abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint. These poems unbolt a portal, allowing Jackson to access her own visionary powers, the language of ‘hunger and awe.’ The result is a poetry so alive that it has the capacity to cradle the dead, to offer a ‘mercy that strips us naked to each other.’ I am moved and transformed by Didi Jackson’s infinity.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry “In the beautifully rendered book of poems, My Infinity by Didi Jackson, the speaker’s voice is meditative, pensive, and warm. Tonally, these poems represent that time of day which is near dusk and twilight, when the day is mostly finished, but is scarred with too much knowledge. My Infinity grapples with the aftermath of a lover’s suicide, alongside new love and joy. Whether it is corresponding with the visual art of Hilma af Klint or the natural world, nothing is too small for this speaker to look at, as with a microscope, and correspond with, as one might correspond with the moon. Here is a poet of witness of awe alongside the music of pain and grief, and of the ‘mercy that strips us naked to each other.’” —Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT

Author Information

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for The Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the Meringoff Prize in Poetry. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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