Jenn Currin

Jen Currin’s newest poems have a journalistic quality, traffic in fragments, and they do many things well that contemporary poets often do. But as grounded as they are in observation and attention to language, they have a larger, largely realized ambition: to weigh the poet’s soul, connecting a jigsaw of events, ideas and perceptions to a metaphysical and ethical project. In a real way, these poems are anti-transcendent, anti-mystical, attuned to the world and its disharmonies but insistent that “Eternity misfits me” and that spirit is made from body and breath. Unfinished manuscripts, bill and lay-offs, hikes and urban coyotes: Currin insists, and we come to agree, that these are all part of our sacred bodies’ sacred lives, even in their disruptions and interruptions, even when they distress and confuse. She helps us see that our lives are real in the deepest sense.