Poetry. ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN is Philip Jenks's first full-length collection. His poems are both intimate and strange, encompassing personal history and the politics of Appalachia, epileptic seizures and Baptist glossolalia, memory cells and Kentucky coal mines. His cave describes the limits of what's known, and his poems explore the "spaces between the aura and the jolt." "At various turns hieratic and profane, their blur the blur—in equal parts—of the confessed and the prophetic, these poems direct us to the language that starts just past 'that point/ where nothing is not.' Cassandra lives there; and Stein—and so does Philip Jenks"—Carl Phillips.

Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA

Philip Jenks was born in the south, grew up in Appalachia and came alive in the Pacific Northwest. Now he's haunting Chicago. His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Typo, FENCE, Cultural Society, H_NGM_N, Canarium, LVNG, and elsewhere. He has published two full-length volumes of poetry, ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN (Flood Editions, 2002) and MY FIRST PAINTING WILL BE "THE ACCUSER" (Zephyr Press, 2005). He also published two chapbooks—The Elms Left Elm Street (Plane Bukt, 1994) and How Many of You Are You? (Dusie, 2006). He has collaborated twice with Simone Muench: Little Visceral Carnival (Cinemateque Press, 2009) and DISAPPEARING ADDRESS (BlazeVOX [books], 2010). He also collaborated with Sasha Miljevic, publishing Distance, an ekphrastic hybrid of prose and poetry (Dutch Art Institute, 2009). He recently completed his third manuscript, Colony Collapse.

Reviews and Other Links
Joel Bettridge @ Jacket
Christopher Mattison @ Boston Review
Aaron Belz @ Jacket