The first edition of The Insomniac’s Weather Report by Jessica Goodfellow, originally published in 2011 as the winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Award, was only briefly available; this new Isobar edition brings this very striking collection back into print. Arranged in four suites, the poems explore the impermanent boundaries that define and – due to their nebulous nature – fail to define the human condition: those between body and self, parent and child, energy and matter. Shifting between formal and prose poems, the myriad voices in this book include an insomniac struggling to delineate the edge between consciousness and sleep, and a couple trapped in a poem cycle that is itself an interlocking meditation on the oblique lines between self and other that constitute marriage.
Jessica Goodfellow’s debut collection The Insomniac’s Weather Report is admirably diverse in its approaches and structures and reads like ‘a fugue of opposites’, integrating the scientist’s persistent enquiry and the philosopher’s rarefied obsessions with this poet’s highly tuned and unique sensibility ‘in a blaze of form and discontent’. With their keen intellect and capacity to hold ambiguity, Goodfellow’s poems are most successful when their complex abstractions are grounded in the body, image, and the human. For this reader, the power of these poems inhabits that space where logic and reason fail, efforts to name and place break apart, and chaos threatens to annihilate. This is a challenging and original debut. – Mari L’Esperance
To say that The Insomniac’s Weather Report is exquisitely thrilling poetry doesn’t begin to do it justice. Wicked and funny as an encyclopaedia of unanswerable koans, elegant as a fifteenth-century flowered silk kimono portraying, perhaps, ‘a hinge on a hingeless door’, it is also savage – containing a hidden history of ‘marriage, / perpetual stagger of desire / and resist’ – and I found it irresistible, as will you, dear reader. – Alicia Ostriker
May 2014. Paperback. 108 pages. 8.5 x 5.5. ISBN 978-4-907359-07-2.
Click here to download an excerpt fromThe Insomniac’s Weather Report.
Click here to read a review of The Insomniac’s Weather Report by Christina Veladota in her blog maybesopoetry.
Click here to read a review of The Insomniac’s Weather Report by Taylor Breslin in The Small Press Book Review.
Click here to buy The Insomniac’s Weather Report from the London Review Bookshop.