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A Very Large Array: Selected Poems
Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman’s acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language―from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots―into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.
Jena Osman ’s (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.
Jena Osman ’s (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.
407 pages, Paperback
Published December 19, 2023
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May 17, 2025
If you are thinking about buying this book and decided to poke onto Goodreads in order to decide whether or not to buy a book of experimental language & visual poetry, I will say that if you are not reading Jena Osman, you are making a mistake. This is an excellent, beautifully designed and printed collection of her work; to me she is downright canonical in terms of how she blends the visual and language worlds, how every text is ripe for examination but not exploitation.
It's hard to explain exactly what is in this book, because it seems to have everything: reflections on the meanings of public statues, the periodic table, Walt Whitman’s dabbling in phrenology, corporate language and legal writing, all rendered into a perfectly reserved poetic experience that varies in structure every time. Discovering Osman’s work was a revelation for me; I think what I love about this collection specifically is that Osman is the perfect type of poet to have a lot of work all in one place. She benefits from having the sheer variety of her interests and subjects and forms on display side by side; you can see the direction of her interests are not just one thing, but rather, as John Berger would have it, a way of seeing. It's impossible to write a review as each section is really its own project; I will simply tell you to go explore it for yourself.
It's hard to explain exactly what is in this book, because it seems to have everything: reflections on the meanings of public statues, the periodic table, Walt Whitman’s dabbling in phrenology, corporate language and legal writing, all rendered into a perfectly reserved poetic experience that varies in structure every time. Discovering Osman’s work was a revelation for me; I think what I love about this collection specifically is that Osman is the perfect type of poet to have a lot of work all in one place. She benefits from having the sheer variety of her interests and subjects and forms on display side by side; you can see the direction of her interests are not just one thing, but rather, as John Berger would have it, a way of seeing. It's impossible to write a review as each section is really its own project; I will simply tell you to go explore it for yourself.
Displaying 1 of 1 review