Streets As Elsewhere The old copper pipes that heat the apartment are rattling as I read these quietly incisive and transient JL Jacobs\u2019 words, fraying with beauty, clarity, death, emmenagogues, and violence. There is snow everywhere. Bitter cold comes and goes. In my grief of C.D., I sought other forms of grief. I see that C.D. Wright before she passed away had blurbed this beautiful book and there is splendor in knowing someone else through someone else.<\/p>\n These Jacobs\u2019 poems, tenacious and un-rasping, moving along in their burial space arrive to us like \u2018liquid arrows\u2019, nailing our memories to wind, seeking solace in concrete ephemerality. Hair and rain, one is a river and still and the other also a river, falling not still, shape the insistent atmosphere of this Jacobs\u2019 poetic semi-minimalism. But the engine that drives this collection into its birth is also birth and midwifing and intermittent violence and the quotidian gestures in brevity from the natural world. In her poem, \u201cCertitude,\u201d Jacobs provides insights on how long it has taken her to usher this collection into our light. Jacobs writes, \u201cHere is a reverse. We take of gales\/ and a landscape of driving rain.\/\/It is the tangled white hair of two decades\/ (definition).\u201d For twenty years, these hush-less, compulsory, seemingly barren poems are formed from Jacobs\u2019 collage of economical insights and and her grandmotherly doula-ish world. The texture of this poem and the feelings they provoke, marked by astringent and heartful restraints, are antediluvian in their monolithic nature, but also reductive in their unceremonious manifestation. These poems remind me of charcoal or white chalk drawings on Stonehenge paper, where a naked tree, maybe a root doctor too, stands alone in an abandoned landscape. A leaf or two breaking apart from the branch and something waiting, wailing to happen or not happen. Sometimes violence arrives and at other times, beauty dressed in her most marginal gown: \u201cI send you this telegram,\/ this sketch of a woman\/ cobalt-blue.\u201d<\/p>\n There are other raw fierceness existing here amongst the \u2018deluded shoreline\u2019 (p. 75), \u201cAnd our bodies also in the half-light. Or, there may have been: leaves full of voices\/ an upturned nipple,\u201d but my favorite poem from this collection lies tangled in the intimate space of the monthly weather. The poem\u2019s title, \u201cAugust and Rain,\u201d showed two women, August and Rain, pressed \u201cagainst one another\/in this narrow bed\u201d of life. These two women don\u2019t come together very often, sometimes only in the month of August. Latexed by a \u201cface thrown into evening\/ moving in too small rooms,\u201d for years to come these poems will continue to make us ache for things we could only find on JL Jacob\u2019s monograph of words as they dance in the rain outside the sphere of the real and unreal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Poetry Review<\/strong>. The old copper pipes that heat the apartment are rattling as I read these quietly incisive and transient JL Jacobs\u2019 words, fraying with beauty, clarity, death, emmenagogues, and violence. There is snow everywhere. Bitter cold comes and goes. In my grief of C.D., I sought other forms of grief. I see that C.D. Wright before she passed away had blurbed this beautiful book and there is splendor in knowing someone else through someone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3160,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/3160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>by JL Jacobs
\nNorman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2014
\n$15. PP. 92<\/p>\n