Description
Poetry. Jean Day's DAYDREAM is a poetic interrogation, from the vantage point of a sonically minimalist and language-oriented form, of one's position in a world of simultaneous brutality, absurdity,and profundity. Situated in the time of the oil wars, poems from DAYDREAM meditate on the pleasures and anxieties of the mundane—idleness that nonetheless feels global reverberations of accelerated mortality lapping at its edges. Jean Day invents apoetic dream-logic with which to tenderly probe the realities of waking life. The day itself is a dream of a body, a personhood, and a planet to which we cling fast, if poorly, as we hurtle into the unknown.
"Jean Day's DAYDREAM is brilliantly astute, imaginative, and keen—let us not be 'deaf to its obvious aptness.' Day's discerning eye-mind upturns the world we think we live in by pondering and questioning and inviting the reader to share in the pleasure of 'beautiful problems, which / arise as toughened thought.' This attention, curiosity, and reverent regard for our everyday surrounds—here local, there global—is the book's tuning fork. DAYDREAM makes a meal 'amid the nutrionless corn' of daily modern life. Where 'So / much flowering is imitation,' Day's writing blooms singularly."—Alli Warren
Author Bio
Jean Day's recent work can be found in The Triumph of Life, a book of poems published by Insurance Editions in 2016, and in Chicago Review, The Delineator, Across the Margin, Open House, Breather, and Jongler (French). She is the author of five previous books of poetry and several chapbooks, among them Early Bird (O'Clock, 2014) and Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (Adventures in Poetry, 2006). Her translations from the Russian of poets Nadezhda Kondakova and Ilya Kutik (with Elena Balashova and Lyn Hejinian, respectively), have been published in Third Wave: New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan, 1992), Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000), and Big Bridge (www.bigbridge.org, 2013). She lives in Berkeley, where she works as managing editor of Representations, an interdisciplinary humanities journal published by the University of California Press.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA