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 has published six books of poetry and several chapbooks, among them THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE (Insurance Editions, 2018), DAYDREAM (Litmus 2017), Early Bird (O'Clock, 2014), and Enthusiasm (Adventures in Poetry, 2006). Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (Roof, 2007), Best American Poems 2004 (Scribner, 2004), Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998), and In the American Tree (National Poetry Foundation, 1986, reprinted 2002). 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