The Declarable Future

by Jennifer Boyden

The poems in this book inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. In this collection of sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous poems, a lost man wanders among the towns of people who can't remember what they named the children, how to find each other's porches, or whether their buildings are still intact. That's why they need the person with the loupe. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world's harvest is whatever swims too close, the person with the loupe steadfastly verifies only what can be measured, while the lost man is witness to the unquantifiable and the limitless. And throughout, precise and observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous, precarious wilderness of The Declarable Future .

Finalist, Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brandi Henderson (Tin House Publicity Intern): I met Jennifer Boyden near the snack table at an artsy open house and knew instantly she was a poet in some bigger way than poem-writing makes someone. Over the course of the couple months we lived in the same coastal town, she regularly delighted me by, say, making her husband a suit jacket out of moss or telling her daughter she couldn’t join her in the cold ocean because her feet were made of sugar. Jennifer’s second book of poetry, The Declarable Future, has rested on my nightstand for some time waiting for its turn. In diving into it, I am transported into a world of quirky parables, of darkly comedic worry for the world we live in, and of imagery reminiscent of an environmentally-conscious Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Throughout the collection, we follow “The Lost Man” who provides a touch of narrative structure to the collection. My favorite poem in the collection, “They Have a Point,” muses about how tickled the gods must have been by the idea of filling the insides of the body with more of the same: “It amuses them / that what is inside the body / is more body. The same body, but different.”

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oregon Book Award nominee