Excerpts from Plan B Audio, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s new book-length poem, were published in Poems: New & Selected (Isobar Press, 2018); here is the complete work. The book was written during, and in response to, a life-threatening encounter with illness, and in the aftermath of the radical surgery that saved the author’s life. This is not, however, a documentary or an autobiographical work, but rather an extraordinary book-length collage of lyrics, phantasmagoric narratives, beautifully honed language work (and play), lament, mourning, fables, demented quests, chronicles of out-of-kilter hospital routine, fierce humour, sadness, anger, love, pain, loss, and survival. It is a work of enormous formal variety, full of powerfully focused writing. The book is illustrated with a series of photographs by Susan Laura Sullivan.
June 2020, 102 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in / 216 x 140 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-29-4
In this, her tenth full-length poetry collection, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa turns to the long poem to explore the phenomenological experience of the body in trauma. ‘Plan B’ suggests contingency: an event the occurrence of which could not have been foreseen, but also a conjuncture of events occurring without design. Combining the austerities of experimental poetics with the emotional stakes of memoir, the work is both consoling and devastating. Spurred by a cancer diagnosis and treatment, Joritz-Nakagawa summons the language of illness and the body in all its violence and intimacy with formidable directness and precision. There is a fierceness of attention to the word as sound and image. Joritz-Nakagawa invites the reader to scrutinise language with the same rigour that the body is scrutinised. This is a powerful feminine epic that gives voice to the intensity of living in a dissonant state. – Nancy Gaffield
Click here to read an excerpt from Plan B Audio.
Plan B Audio has now received powerful reviews from two of the poets whose own work Jane most admires, Pam Brown and Frances Presley – see below.. Thank you Pam and Frances!
Australian poet Pam Brown has written a review of Plan B Audio for Transnational Literature. The poem is not, Pam says, an exclusive autobiographical account … [but] a lyrically intimate, private and public (i.e. political) chronicle in a context that is of-the-world.… the fierce candour of the poem is intense and unsettling even given its moments of alleviating irony, awkwardness, delirium, humour, love and sadness. Click here to read the whole review.
The UK poet Frances Presley has written a long, perceptive and moving review of Plan B Audio in the Long Poem Magazine. It begins: Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Plan B Audio deploys a variety of poetic and narrative styles, often experimental, within an overwhelming context of disease and damage. Arranged as one long poem, with no sub-titles, it charts the author’s treatment for cancer in remarkable detail and honesty, but also with constant creative energy and invention. Click here to read the whole review.
In Joritz-Nakagawa’s poem we are presented with a sinuous winding and weaving of words that seem both to keep the reader at a distance whilst at the same time drawing that same reader into a dystopia. – Ian Brinton in Tears in the Fence. Click here to read the whole review.
Toward the end of Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s relentlessly bold, tenth poetry collection, Plan B Audio, the poet makes note of “the room within”.… While italicization here may be yet another instance of the book’s many inner voices in their own operating and recovery rooms … my sense is that the book, as a whole, is the poet’s “room within.” This room into which we as readers are permitted intimate and often horrific entry is a changing and changeable room of entrapment and imagination, the fears and turbulence of potentially, dangerously fatal illness—and its accompanying hospitalization (treatment)—and the specter of disablement. Disability is enlivened through a non-dramatic, often humorous, and scathingly honest poetic conversation with death.– Diane R. Wiener in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. Click here to read the whole review.
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