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After Image
Woven from dreamlike and echoing images, After Image travels between life and death, between a living body and its absence.
A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published October 8, 2024
3 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Jenny George
8 books13 followersJenny George earned her BA in human ecology and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon, 2018), and her poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals. Winner of the 2015 Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize, George has received fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as program coordinator for Hidden Leaf Foundation, a Buddhist-based social justice organization.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 20, 2025
I love short poems, but find them very hard to write. After Image offers one stunning example after another of what great, short poems are. I love the depth and range they create with just the right amount of specificity without ever slipping into obtuseness nor the purely metaphorical and generalities. Each word is given its full measure and space to expand, with none to spare. These poems land softly then spread, and what a pleasure it is to feel that.
January 15, 2025
Poetry that’s as clean, clear and beautiful as freshly fallen snow.
August 18, 2025
A really fine book of poetry on grief. Grief is love.
May 5, 2025
Late afternoon, the sun through pines is …The light’s minor key.
You can’t look anywhere and not be looking at the world exactly as it is.
A personhood flashes through me: something electrical and bright through my limbs.
A voice keeps singing even without an instrument.
Every book or memoir or poem about grief can tread on worn paths, weary similes, woeful imagery, so this book of poems of grief was such a refreshing and deep way to describe the experience of sorrow, loss, nostalgia, moving on. We all do move on, mostly, even if we are mired in grief, it isn’t the same as it was a month ago, a year, many years.
I wrote a poem about how no one had told me how walking in snow and letting it accumulate on your tear-swollen eyes is such relief, especially if you walk at night, and are near a light pole and the falling snow can look like stars falling and showering down on you, and how can you feel alone in a world like that? That is the type of noticing the author writes about and shares. I have been surrounded by too many robots lately, and this was a clarion call for the ones who feel things.
FIRST SNOWDROP
White bone-bell emerging from last year’s broken down leaves; little cup of inverted feeling that begins in the dark and on spring’s signal climbs out— as if the instructions are: to articulate.
RAIN AND STARS
A person can be removed. All evidence points to it. And in the space left behind— It rained all night. A heavy, even rain that added to the pond. Now there are tiny fish scissoring in the blackness. New alphabets, not encased in anything— these ripples of emergence, silver darts in a withdrawing sky.
BLACK BUTTERFLIES
Before the two men from the mortuary touched her body, they put their hands into black silk gloves. Four black butterflies stood on the white bedsheet. Four black butterflies wove the sheet into a chrysalis around her. They rested lightly on her—a giant mother— pulsing slowly, signaling to one another with silent wingbeats. Then the butterflies carried the bound form out into the bright, etherizing light of late spring. I thought: This is what life does, it bears away the damaged and the dead. Now she is in the world in a new way, like a baby drained of all suffering. And now when I sleep, from time to time my eyes flicker open: black iridescent creatures hover, drinking the warm, heavy drops upwelling from the source.
(I saw black mourning cloak butterflies on my birthday hike in a forest just waking from winter, and I was shaken by the holiness.)
and this was my mom, gone for over 12 years, saying hi and accompanying me....
AFTERIMAGE
She is standing under the blooming theater of an apricot tree, looking out from her not-knowing, her being-alive. A strong sunlight draws out the dark from under both eyes. Now, what occurred is inevitable. Like a water jar filled to the brim with water, not one drop of space exists for any other eventuality. Each spring the fruit trees stage this same party, white garlands shedding their blossoms all over the garden.
AFTERLIFE
The apricot tree will bear no apricots this year. In early spring a shudder of blossoms came over it briefly, but another severe night arrived, leaving ice in the pail. By morning, the tree was stripped. A personhood flashes through me: something electrical and bright through my limbs.
THE PROBLEM OF THE LANTERN
The dead are not personal. That is part of the difficulty. Like the problem of the lantern: It illuminates without seeing, unless seeing is itself the element that falls on things in the form of light. I often lie awake in the dark for hours. Death is a brand-new experience, but it’s not clear who it happens to.
THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS
okay okay I am being carried along on a great river I pass through the country through fields alongside ruins and orchards I ride like a cup on a saucer the river is a large continual motion that isn’t me I hear light vibrating in my mouth a heart beats inside this head apparently something is singing fragmented music trails me a foam of moments a flicker of tree-shadow touches my face touch without sensation of my prior existence I have only a phantom knowledge did we love did we lie down among the bee-sound on warm grass a head is only now now now
INTERIOR (WINTER MORNING)
Sunlight decants from the other half of existence into this one. In the kitchen, a bowl of mandarins radiates emptiness. Who were you that even now the air’s disturbed? Steam twists from the kettle. The body goes on living while the self tunnels away at its voluminous dream, a vole in snow.
ORPHEUS ASCENDING
A crack appeared. Beyond it, snow was pouring through the spring sunlight. A bright, dry snow like particles of unearthly metal. I emerged. And the earth closed after me, keeping her inside, the way an instrument case will seal shut around its black music. Or was I the instrument? Or was it not music, but pain singing from the depths?
I still live in our little house by the orchard, sited so the setting sun illuminates the garden, the bubbling fountain like a fountain of fire in the final moments before night draws across its lid. Then, absolute quiet. Even the wind resting in the trees. We on earth, how can we know how long the silences will be between the movements? I wait for song to grow in me across the dark interval.
You can’t look anywhere and not be looking at the world exactly as it is.
A personhood flashes through me: something electrical and bright through my limbs.
A voice keeps singing even without an instrument.
Every book or memoir or poem about grief can tread on worn paths, weary similes, woeful imagery, so this book of poems of grief was such a refreshing and deep way to describe the experience of sorrow, loss, nostalgia, moving on. We all do move on, mostly, even if we are mired in grief, it isn’t the same as it was a month ago, a year, many years.
I wrote a poem about how no one had told me how walking in snow and letting it accumulate on your tear-swollen eyes is such relief, especially if you walk at night, and are near a light pole and the falling snow can look like stars falling and showering down on you, and how can you feel alone in a world like that? That is the type of noticing the author writes about and shares. I have been surrounded by too many robots lately, and this was a clarion call for the ones who feel things.
FIRST SNOWDROP
White bone-bell emerging from last year’s broken down leaves; little cup of inverted feeling that begins in the dark and on spring’s signal climbs out— as if the instructions are: to articulate.
RAIN AND STARS
A person can be removed. All evidence points to it. And in the space left behind— It rained all night. A heavy, even rain that added to the pond. Now there are tiny fish scissoring in the blackness. New alphabets, not encased in anything— these ripples of emergence, silver darts in a withdrawing sky.
BLACK BUTTERFLIES
Before the two men from the mortuary touched her body, they put their hands into black silk gloves. Four black butterflies stood on the white bedsheet. Four black butterflies wove the sheet into a chrysalis around her. They rested lightly on her—a giant mother— pulsing slowly, signaling to one another with silent wingbeats. Then the butterflies carried the bound form out into the bright, etherizing light of late spring. I thought: This is what life does, it bears away the damaged and the dead. Now she is in the world in a new way, like a baby drained of all suffering. And now when I sleep, from time to time my eyes flicker open: black iridescent creatures hover, drinking the warm, heavy drops upwelling from the source.
(I saw black mourning cloak butterflies on my birthday hike in a forest just waking from winter, and I was shaken by the holiness.)
and this was my mom, gone for over 12 years, saying hi and accompanying me....
AFTERIMAGE
She is standing under the blooming theater of an apricot tree, looking out from her not-knowing, her being-alive. A strong sunlight draws out the dark from under both eyes. Now, what occurred is inevitable. Like a water jar filled to the brim with water, not one drop of space exists for any other eventuality. Each spring the fruit trees stage this same party, white garlands shedding their blossoms all over the garden.
AFTERLIFE
The apricot tree will bear no apricots this year. In early spring a shudder of blossoms came over it briefly, but another severe night arrived, leaving ice in the pail. By morning, the tree was stripped. A personhood flashes through me: something electrical and bright through my limbs.
THE PROBLEM OF THE LANTERN
The dead are not personal. That is part of the difficulty. Like the problem of the lantern: It illuminates without seeing, unless seeing is itself the element that falls on things in the form of light. I often lie awake in the dark for hours. Death is a brand-new experience, but it’s not clear who it happens to.
THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS
okay okay I am being carried along on a great river I pass through the country through fields alongside ruins and orchards I ride like a cup on a saucer the river is a large continual motion that isn’t me I hear light vibrating in my mouth a heart beats inside this head apparently something is singing fragmented music trails me a foam of moments a flicker of tree-shadow touches my face touch without sensation of my prior existence I have only a phantom knowledge did we love did we lie down among the bee-sound on warm grass a head is only now now now
INTERIOR (WINTER MORNING)
Sunlight decants from the other half of existence into this one. In the kitchen, a bowl of mandarins radiates emptiness. Who were you that even now the air’s disturbed? Steam twists from the kettle. The body goes on living while the self tunnels away at its voluminous dream, a vole in snow.
ORPHEUS ASCENDING
A crack appeared. Beyond it, snow was pouring through the spring sunlight. A bright, dry snow like particles of unearthly metal. I emerged. And the earth closed after me, keeping her inside, the way an instrument case will seal shut around its black music. Or was I the instrument? Or was it not music, but pain singing from the depths?
I still live in our little house by the orchard, sited so the setting sun illuminates the garden, the bubbling fountain like a fountain of fire in the final moments before night draws across its lid. Then, absolute quiet. Even the wind resting in the trees. We on earth, how can we know how long the silences will be between the movements? I wait for song to grow in me across the dark interval.
September 16, 2025
"Love, if you're real, make me the earth's again."
After Image by Jenny George follows the speaker's daily routine as they sit in the grief of losing their partner. As I was reading this collection, I felt that I was being hit with the same wave of grief over and over again, which was interesting, but became monotonous. I wanted to feel the multitude of grief and I felt that this collection was not ready to discuss its own pain. The collection was very cohesive and I really appreciated the recurring images throughout, tying everything into a circle. But I wanted more from the one note—if the intention of the collection was to create an onslaught of cycles, I wanted to feel layers of sameness. After Image was drowning in hurt without room to turn over and sigh.
"Life lasts so long now."
After Image by Jenny George follows the speaker's daily routine as they sit in the grief of losing their partner. As I was reading this collection, I felt that I was being hit with the same wave of grief over and over again, which was interesting, but became monotonous. I wanted to feel the multitude of grief and I felt that this collection was not ready to discuss its own pain. The collection was very cohesive and I really appreciated the recurring images throughout, tying everything into a circle. But I wanted more from the one note—if the intention of the collection was to create an onslaught of cycles, I wanted to feel layers of sameness. After Image was drowning in hurt without room to turn over and sigh.
"Life lasts so long now."
December 30, 2024
Crushingly beautiful compressed lyrics that grab our distracted attention spans and force us to listen and think. Here is 7lb. 14 oz: "They burned you down to a box/and gave you back/to me like that-- newborn dust, your exact birthweight's/ worth--now wrapped in a black/velvet bag and delivered/into my remaining hands." Barely a wasted word that resonates with vulnerability, and despite the shattered pieces of loss, she bears witness with fierce determination so that by the end of the collection, she writes, "Listen/I'll keep trying to love." The everyday language of her verse invites everyone to come and share the tribulations of this broken world where we can come together and find solace together. It's a powerful, moving book.
October 19, 2025
Not only does Jenny George know loss, but she has a distinct knack for making it more approachable and less traumatic for readers. I underlined my copy heavily and might put it on the nightstand to revisit regularly. Highly recommend this.
December 29, 2024
Jenny George is essential.
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March 12, 2025
What a breathtaking and haunting collection!
Read
July 16, 2025a great poetics of grief and astonishment. I love Jenny George
August 14, 2025
A metamorphic journey into the strange landscape of grief and how it impacts love. It is an absolutely beautiful collection.
October 4, 2025
self inspection
October 11, 2025
Death, dressed in its Sunday best. Painted in watercolor. Served almost sweet.
Jenny George’s collection stuns in its balance—heavy / light, above / below, grief / grace.
Jenny George’s collection stuns in its balance—heavy / light, above / below, grief / grace.
October 15, 2025
Really lovely, stark poetry full of wintery and heartwrenching imagery. I’m a fan.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews