In JeanValentine's first book, her poems transformed dreams into living experience by means of luminous language that echoed the unconscious mind's revelations. In her later books, she almost reverse
"As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."?Library JournalIn her eleventh collection?honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry?Jean Valen
Eighteen new poems extend the trajectory of JeanValentine’s work. Included are selections from her four previous books:Dream Barker, Pilgrims, Ordinary Things, and The Messenger. Her themes of pilgri
"JeanValentine has written a visionary book. If it is built with the brick and wood of this world, the light that pours through its windows is searing, healing."—Marie Howe
"[JeanValentine's] poems are a rare pleasure: serious and graceful, never glib, testimony to the strength and beauty of the lyric as a music of words, not ideas. As elliptical and demanding as Emily
"JeanValentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."?The
Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, JeanValentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely
"Lucy / your secret book / that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt - / Not having to have an ending / Not having to last"... and so begins JeanValentine's provocative new work, Lucy, a poem
Of her book, JeanValentine wrote, "Juliet Patterson's poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue — all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history. The Truan
Guardian angels come to us in all shapes, sizes and species. Mine came in the form of a beautiful, loving, black Labrador named Joe Joe. He shaped my future through his own pain and illness, and led m
"A poet of genius."?Vladimir NabokovVia what Ilya Kaminsky and JeanValentine call "readings"?not translations?of fragments of Marina Tsvetaeva's poems and prose, Tsvetaeva's lyrical genius is made ac
Seattle was a very different city in 1960 than it is today. There were no black bus drivers, sales clerks, or bank tellers. Black children rarely attended the same schools as white children. And few b
Seattle was a very different city in 1960 than it is today. There were no black bus drivers, sales clerks, or bank tellers. Black children rarely attended the same schools as white children. And few b
