Description:
Moving dramatically inward from her immense geographic and forensic terrain-Jeanine Stevens investigates Modernist dance, film, painting, collage, masquerade, and psychology in Ornate Persona. She distills her gifts as a lyric anthropologist in this, her most introspective collection thus far. We sense that she's investigating her own psyche, even while handling such themes as a Nijinsky ballet. Her associative dance leads us fluidly from poem to poem, as she empathizes with the gifted, ill-fated Tanaquil Le Clercq, celebrated dancer and muse to George Balanchine: it is the ballet "Afternoon of a Faun" which unites Nijinsky and Tanaquil across the decades in Stevens' mind. And we become one body with Nijinsky himself, admiring our own sinew. "My Egyptian eyes, lacquered hair / body taped / like a character doll. Was it a dream feathering down my neck / or just thoughts, leaf points growing / from the green felt skullcap?"
Stevens' power to captivate guides us from a Joseph Cornell box to familiar 20th-century masterworks like the film Black Orpheus, then to the mysterious series of mandalas created by Carl Jung's patient, Miss X. Stevens' poetry keeps us reading, thinking, and feeling.
-Tom Goff, author Twelve-Tone Row: Music in Words.
Brief description: Jeanine Stevens is the author of Limberlost and Inheritor (Future Cycle Press). Her first poetry collection, Sailing on Milkweed, was published by Cherry Grove Collections. She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, The Stockton Arts Commission Award, The Ekphrasis Prize, and WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Poetry Award. Brief Immensity, won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Her most recent chapbook, Gertrude Sitting: Portraits of Women, won The Heartland Review 2020 Chapbook Award. She participated in Literary Lectures sponsored by Poets and Writers. Work has appeared in North Dakota Review, Evansville Review, The Kerf, Stoneboat, Rosebud, and Chiron Review. Jeanine studied poetry at U.C. Davis, earned her M.A. at CSU Sacramento, and has a doctorate in Education. She is also a collage artist and has exhibited her work in various art galleries. Jeanine is Professor Emerita at American River College. Raised in Indiana, she now divides her time between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.