Poetry. "AN ESSAY IN ASTERISKS by Jena Osman is a multi-part book analysis regarding the intersection of public language and private perception. In that elusive space Osman eclipses the expected with the expected and poetics with poetry. She explores social issues such as sense and memory, perception and truth with poetic skills that astonish at every page. Using fonts and images to illuminate the manuscript, Osman's Essay is a tour de force of magnitude and seriousness. Jena Osman's writing takes language as the ultimate double-agent, in which official and personal allegiances collide into and reimagine censorship, memory, translation and rhetoric. AN ESSAY IN ASTERISKS generously offers a sustained and often comic view of how uncannily public discourse shimmers with private meanings."—Thalia Field

Author City: PHILADELPHIA, PA USA

Jena Osman's books include THE NETWORK, AN ESSAY IN ASTERISKS, and The Character. Her work has been translated into French, Swedish, and Serbo-Croatian. With Juliana Spahr (with whom she edited the literary magazine CHAIN for twelve years) she edits the ChainLinks Book Series. Osman teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at Temple University.