Poetry. "As paradises are repeatedly lost and found in calm prosodic temper, good-natured terror makes surprise appearances, disrupting in layered ('latent' 'pleasing' 'violent') contradiction. Recounting and reflecting upon conditions of contingency and presence, at moments Grim echoes Sappho's address to what's just out of reach. Something momentous ('hefty') is going on—read FRAY and discover what it is!"—Norma Cole

"Jessica Grim in FRAY achieves an extraordinary subtle and varied movement of words and silences in her poems by means of line breaks, strophe breaks, enjambment, variation in types of syntactical units, and several kinds of 'rests,' notably caesural spaces of several different lengths and sometimes dashes. Her word choices and their referents are also greatly varied and the relations between their sounds are very stimulating and satisfying. Altogether a beautiful book of poetry."—Jackson Mac Low

Author City: OBERLIN, OH USA

Jessica Grim grew up in the Bay Area, and lived for periods in Texas, New York, and (again) California before moving, in the early 90's, to NE Ohio. VEXED (BlazeVOX [books], 2009) was first published as an ebook by /ubu Editions. Other books of poetry include FRAY (O Books, 1998), LOCALE (Potes & Poets Press, 1995), and THE INVETERATE LIFE (O Books, 1990). With Melanie Neilson she co-edited Big Allis, a magazine focusing on experimental writing by women (1989-1996). She lives in Oberlin, OH, with her husband and son, and is a librarian at Oberlin College.