Description
Poetry. Winner of the 2016 Red Mountain Poetry Prize. WOMAN PUTTING ON PEARLS explores human connection and want as manifested through touch and the physically palpable gaze. With richly patterned sounds and rhythms, the collection forms a loose narrative in seven short sections acting much like musical movements. It traces the arc of life from childhood through death, integrating and savoring sensory experience in all its terrors, pleasures and aches. Interlaced throughout is a series of Voyeur poems focused on a man's one-sided relationship with a woman he secretly watches. These are presented as interludes and constitute a separate but related loose narrative. Together, the two threads consider the tensions between the opposing needs for intimacy and independence, and the conflict between the desire to escape time and mortality and the desire to be wholly present in body, tasting all the delicious particulars of the world.
"In WOMAN PUTTING ON PEARLS, poet Jeffrey Bean speaks of the body, its loneliness, hungers, and joy. The body in WOMAN PUTTING ON PEARLS is essentially an isolated entity continuously seeking, not only attachment, but utter oneness with the other. But these poems, like want, are complex. The speaker in the 'voyeur' series is sympathetic, pathetic, and frightening all at once. These seeming disparate views of body-love become points on a continuum of the human need to see, touch, love, and even worship another. Through insightful, sharp, and nuanced writing, Bean holds these contradictions in his steady gaze, no need for reconciliation."—Sarah Sousa
"In Jeffrey Bean's WOMAN PUTTING ON PEARLS there's the excruciating pleasure of wanting—the tastes, the smells, the gaze that longs for a body as slippery as a ruby. In each of these gorgeous poems I lose track of the boundaries of flesh and bread, dirt and the beloved's hair, what the body holds and what holds a body. Through every season and each love, everything in the world wants in, wants a closeness, an intimacy that overtakes and consumes and transcends time, distance, and skin. And it makes you want that, too. So do. Open the curtains and open this book and let everything in."—Traci Brimhall
"These are love poems for fearful lovers, people who know that all romance is half panic. Or sometimes these are elegies sung by giddy mourners. Often they are both. The speakers in Jeffrey Bean's WOMAN PUTTING ON PEARLS use rhythm and rhyme, repetition and reference to understand and order the world, while deeply 'loving the ache of it' in all of its gorgeous and terrifying and impossible particulars."—Patrick Ryan Frank
Author Bio
Jeffrey Bean is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. He is author of the poetry collection Diminished Fifth (WordTech) and the chapbooks Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Southeast Missouri State University Press) and The Voyeur's Litany (Anabiosis Press). His poems have been featured on The Writer's Almanac, in the 2014 and 2016 New Poetry from the Midwest anthologies, and in Garrison Keillor's anthology, Good Poems, American Places. Recent poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Willow Springs, Smartish Pace, Crab Orchard Review, and River Styx.
Author City: MOUNT PLEASANT, MI USA