How To Emerge

by Jill Jones

How To Emerge, the latest collection from award-winning poet Jill Jones, is filled with visions and ghosts, doubles and shadows. It also explores the living and damaged body, as it dances with humans, birds, animals, leaves, the weather, digital assemblage, sound and song, the elements and the planet. Within this, a self grows into its moment and continues moving beyond itself. Questing and agile, these poems mingle in the world’s imperilled present and its past and future emergencies and losses. The book has an exhilarating and spontaneous sense of passage as the everyday touches everything here: life as it emerges and turns in seasons and trauma, desire and distance, scars and social ecologies, night and day, the music of the world, variations of joy, doubt and grief. As always, Jones’ poems are capacious, haunting and invigorating, as she offers a queer and tactile swerve through the desires and debris of past and present, and the uncanny echoes of our approaching futures.

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2025

Reviews

[Chris Benetti]

How To Emerge is a haunting and invigorating collection that beautifully captures the feeling of living, changing, and searching for meaning in an unsettled world. Jill Jones moves effortlessly between the human body, nature, animals, weather, technology, desire, memory, joy, and grief, creating poems that feel both tactile and expansive. I loved the way the collection allows personal experience to echo outward into larger questions about damaged bodies, fragile ecosystems, and uncertain futures. Strange, vibrant, and deeply alive, this is poetry that rewards attention and leaves behind a lingering sense of movement and possibility.