Description:
Jean Janzen's luminous poetry has been shining its way into top magazines and eight books for decades; this volume gathers poems from all those books and a generous set of new poems.
Brief description: Jean Janzen, a poet living in Fresno, California, is the author of seven previous collections of poetry who has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and other awards. A graduate of Fresno Pacific University and California State University of Fresno, she has taught at Fresno Pacific and Eastern Mennonite University.
Review Quotes: Praise for Jean Janzen's Poetry
"With some (not necessarily all) good poets, one can open their pages at random, read a line or stanza detached from its context, yet be rewarded by incontestable poetry. Janzen is such a poet." -Denise Levertov, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems
"Janzen's poetry speaks of love as . . . a radical wholeness that radiates outward and does not fence-off boundaries between what is sacred and what profane, what belongs to body and what to spirit." -Peter Everwine, Pulling the Invisible but Heavy Cart: Last Poems
"What a wonderful surprise we get in the love Jean Janzen writes about." -The Hiram Poetry Review
"Janzen's poetry . . . is a mirror that accepts, then gives back subtly changed-seasoned with a mature, imaginative intelligence-the scenes, the people, the events that color the poet's life and memory. Janzen transforms the world before our eyes." -Luci Shaw, Angels Everywhere
"Janzen writes our songs. As you read these poems, you realize they are prayers 'smoldering in your chest'; if you contemplate them too long, they will lean you low, so low you will be able to '. . . put your ear / against the belly of the earth, to hear / it rumble, to hear it sigh.''' -Rudy Wiebe, Come Back
"Janzen's poems are lucid, clean, beautifully detailed-but she also knows well how fierce the hungers of body and spirit are. -Jeff Gundy, Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems
"Janzen addresses her treasured topics-desire, mystery, language, family and heritage, music, embodied spirituality-with confidence and grace. Write it, the hunger and the song, ' says one poem. And she does, brilliantly. Janzen's vision has never been clearer; her words have never confessed more truth. This book took more than 80 years to write, and its final, passionate message is 'mercy, ' a resounding 'Yes."" -Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Author, As Is