Poems: New & Selected, edited by Paul Rossiter, includes excerpts from Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s moving new poem, Plan B Audio, together with generous selections from her fourteen previous ground-breaking publications – ranging from Skin Museum (2006) to Distant Landscapes (2017) – and an insightful foreword by poet and translator Eric Selland, who writes: ‘Joritz-Nakagawa’s poetics is unique in the generation which came of age during the period when the LANGUAGE movement was at its peak. Hers is a radically open form – a framework through which the data of life, poetic themes and materials, freely migrate. She does not reject the personal, but she does not privilege it either. It is simply part of the data. And yet one senses a personal warmth, the presence of an intelligent observer in Jane’s work. What we experience as readers is not “the death of the author” – the poetic subject has simply become more complex. For Jane, as with Blanchot, the poem never ends. It is an infinitely open system, always searching for that which is unexplainable and unattainable: the poem is constantly in search of itself.’
‘Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s poetry has moved to a place in which the territory between poem and book have blurred, even as the writing and Joritz-Nakagawa’s perceptions have sharpened. … At core, Joritz-Nakagawa is more a descriptive poet, but without the austerity that so often accompanies that aesthetic, than a metaphoric one. My favorite moments – there are many – come when she builds a rapid-fire linkage of seeming opposites into larger structures that feel deeply inevitable, like life itself.’ – Ron Silliman
‘Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s poems partake readily in the pleasures of freshly arranged particles and atoms of language. Frequenting a realm of sanguine appropriation, ingenious observation, thought and feeling, she daringly reorders and disrupts conventional poetic expectations – and she often conducts this pretty quickly. Readers, be alert.’ – Pam Brown
‘I am intrigued by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s work, which constantly challenges our expectations. Real acts of violence are enacted in violent distortions of language. … In a threatening landscape, a diseased ecosphere, very little can be relied on, not even the grand narratives of gender theory, which she explores so perceptively.‘– Frances Presley
August 2018, 192 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in / 216 x 140 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-25-6
Click here to download a PDF of excerpts from Poems: New & Selected.
Click here to read a review of Poems: New & Selected by Ian Brinton in Tears in the Fence.
Click here to read a review by Michael Northen in Wordgathering.
Click here to read a review by Dominique Hecq in Text.
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