Overview

Woven from dreamlike and echoing images, After Imagetravels between life and death, between a living body and its absence. A house, an orchard, ""a shudder of blossoms."" A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George's After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. ""And in the space / left behind-"" Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet's persona appears as its own character-the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief's terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George's sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.

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9781556596957

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Reviews

“Shimmering, mystical, and incisive . . . reaches into the ether of the human experience and illuminates the irrational nature of emotions. . . . George’s jewel of a collection acts as both a catalyst and antidote for philosophical ruminations.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “Reminds us of the liminal nature of existence; the poems exist on a threshold between states of being and move quietly between worlds. . . . The power of The Dream of Reason is revelation through image, and yet these images radiate with feeling. George has given us a brilliant debut.”—Tupelo Quarterly “George is an expert tour guide of cruelty through a lens of tenderness and humanity, bringing us to the thresholds of what we can possibly endure, making the thresholds glimmer with morning sun, reaching towards ‘happiness with its horizon of pain.’”—The Rumpus “Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason is nature poetry as phantasm, paradox, evocation, assembly line, and hard-earned beauty. These poems collide the sublime with the earthly, the farm with the netherworld.”—Orion Magazine “George’s clear, uncanny poems are haunting, in both their action and their make-up. . . . [She] subtly unravels the very reason and artifice embedded in the making of a poem; she dismantles and proves the instability of a poem’s supposed logics and truths without a loss of lyric or emotional force. This gentle taking apart of structure, meaning the poems become both familiar and unfamiliar to us, alongside the poems’ strangeness and dark surrealism—trains fall through fields, the brain is a ‘murderous bulb’—all induce the skin-pricking feeling of the crooked and uncanny.”—White Review

Author Information

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

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