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Days of Shame & Failure
It's hard to resist using a game show announcer's voice when discussing Jennifer Knox's latest collection, Days of Shame & Failure. Knox knows how to draw human complexity out of absurdity and kitsch (and vice versa) without positioning herself above it. She is one of us, sharing our fear and wonder, and we feel this sense of community as if there were five million other viewers-a spin on Whitman's "multitudes"-watching along with us to see how she makes it out of each lyrically harrowing poem. Is that camp? Is it satire? Who cares! "Whatever it is," as one poem reports, it gives me "a real, really felt feeling," and that's what I'm a sucker for every time. -Gregory Pardlo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for DIGEST Jennifer L. Knox is one of our funniest writers, but what places her work in a realm of its own is the empathy that surrounds, contradicts, and occasionally undermines the joke, sending us far beyond the punch line. Written from the far edge of vast experience, these poems lyricize the post-beatdown quality of middle age. The marvelously capacious Days of Shame & Failure is the work of a genius at her peak, the best book yet from one of our most brilliant and sui generis American writers. -Sarah Manguso, author of ONGOINGNESS Jennifer L. Knox is an iconic American poet whose work has been compared to Richard Pryor, Sarah Silverman, cartoonist R. Crumb, musician Randy Newman, and magician Doug Henning. None of these comparisons is quite right, however. Knox's work is unmistakably her surprisingly empathetic, utterly original, both funny and frightening, like America itself. And like the best comedians, she is never merely each of her speakers has something important to say. Knox's poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series and in the anthologies Great American Prose From Poe to Present and Best American Erotic Poems, as well as in such publications as the New York Times, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and McSweeney's. Her first three books of poems are also available from Bloof The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me.
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2015
2 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer L. Knox
16 books26 followersJennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California—home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Space Shuttle. Her other books of poems, Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me, are also available through Bloof. A volume of her verse in German, Wir Fürchten Uns, is available through Lux Books. Her poems have appeared in three volumes of the Best American Poetry series, Best American Erotic Poems, Great American Prose Poems: From Poet to Present, and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 29, 2015
Here's my review for the New York Times Book Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/boo...
A majority of new poetry today is published by small, dedicated independent presses whose lists are brief and whose staffs conduct their labors for love, not money. Yet even in this field of enthusiastic editors working hard to promote authors while holding down day jobs, the affection displayed by the New Jersey-based Bloof Books for the poet Jennifer L. Knox stands out. Bloof, which publishes only one or two titles per year, came into being just to keep Knox’s first book, “A Gringo Like Me,” in print. The editors describe Knox as their “very own poet laureate” and “primary reason for being.”
Reading her imaginative and irreverent tragicomic fourth collection, “Days of Shame & Failure,” it’s easy to see why. Knox’s poems hit, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.
They’re also genre-bending, dizzying in their versatility. Some are traditionally lineated and rhyming (“Cue: ‘Action Man’ Theme”); a good number are prose poems (“Iowa Plates”); some are practically verse plays (“Radical Honesty Night”); while still others border on flash fiction (“ ‘It’s Hard to Shtup a Snake, but Not Impossible!’ ”).
In some cases they push against expectations of how poems can speak, and what they can do. “Henry Mancini: Now There Was an Entertainer,” for instance — which features a third stanza critiquing Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” and an ars poetica declaration that “Unfunny people love to think they think things on purpose — and that their thoughts are precious. Some poets think their feelings are more special than regular people” — succeeds as both poetry and literary criticism.
Dynamic and shape-shifting as “Days of Shame & Failure” is, Knox holds it all together with her acerbic, down-to-earth voice and dark, perverse and appealing comic-apocalyptic worldview. The threat — or promise, really — of extinction opens and closes the book, with the first poem, “The New ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ ” concluding, “It’s that kind of poem: a poem for the end of the world,” while the last, “Immutable,” ends, “Not the way we’ll slip out of this world, / our swan songs clogging the ears of all / the wordless species going first— / ‘After you.’ They do not define us: / these skins, these sky-high / piles of hides.”
If imagination, in Wallace Stevens’s famous phrase, is the “necessary angel,” in Knox’s poems that angel is dirty-mouthed and rebellious, swooping in on unexpected wings to offer not salvation or comfort but an opportunity to engage in honest and complicated empathy. In “The Kensington Stables,” she writes of a horse meeting its end in a public place, “surrounded by little girls gently petting it / and cooing,” demanding that the reader “Imagine what it is like to die like that: your killer / size immobilized and patronized by pink glittery nails / and sticky hands as if you were harmless, or a unicorn.”
Knox’s poetry is massively entertaining, but it’s an entertainment of substance. The rhetoric of her rapid flight through ideas, anecdotes and assertions owes as much to stand-up comedy as to the poetic tradition. She finds the humor in almost everything, and then keeps going to find the sadness, as when she writes, “Whoever tied the Mylar birthday balloon to the dead squirrel on Main Street thinks big.” Death, she reminds the reader, is everywhere, and it’s going to get us all. That reminder becomes a bizarre relief, spoken by a brilliantly blunt poet whose subtle pleasures cannot — and should not — be ignored.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/boo...
A majority of new poetry today is published by small, dedicated independent presses whose lists are brief and whose staffs conduct their labors for love, not money. Yet even in this field of enthusiastic editors working hard to promote authors while holding down day jobs, the affection displayed by the New Jersey-based Bloof Books for the poet Jennifer L. Knox stands out. Bloof, which publishes only one or two titles per year, came into being just to keep Knox’s first book, “A Gringo Like Me,” in print. The editors describe Knox as their “very own poet laureate” and “primary reason for being.”
Reading her imaginative and irreverent tragicomic fourth collection, “Days of Shame & Failure,” it’s easy to see why. Knox’s poems hit, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.
They’re also genre-bending, dizzying in their versatility. Some are traditionally lineated and rhyming (“Cue: ‘Action Man’ Theme”); a good number are prose poems (“Iowa Plates”); some are practically verse plays (“Radical Honesty Night”); while still others border on flash fiction (“ ‘It’s Hard to Shtup a Snake, but Not Impossible!’ ”).
In some cases they push against expectations of how poems can speak, and what they can do. “Henry Mancini: Now There Was an Entertainer,” for instance — which features a third stanza critiquing Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” and an ars poetica declaration that “Unfunny people love to think they think things on purpose — and that their thoughts are precious. Some poets think their feelings are more special than regular people” — succeeds as both poetry and literary criticism.
Dynamic and shape-shifting as “Days of Shame & Failure” is, Knox holds it all together with her acerbic, down-to-earth voice and dark, perverse and appealing comic-apocalyptic worldview. The threat — or promise, really — of extinction opens and closes the book, with the first poem, “The New ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ ” concluding, “It’s that kind of poem: a poem for the end of the world,” while the last, “Immutable,” ends, “Not the way we’ll slip out of this world, / our swan songs clogging the ears of all / the wordless species going first— / ‘After you.’ They do not define us: / these skins, these sky-high / piles of hides.”
If imagination, in Wallace Stevens’s famous phrase, is the “necessary angel,” in Knox’s poems that angel is dirty-mouthed and rebellious, swooping in on unexpected wings to offer not salvation or comfort but an opportunity to engage in honest and complicated empathy. In “The Kensington Stables,” she writes of a horse meeting its end in a public place, “surrounded by little girls gently petting it / and cooing,” demanding that the reader “Imagine what it is like to die like that: your killer / size immobilized and patronized by pink glittery nails / and sticky hands as if you were harmless, or a unicorn.”
Knox’s poetry is massively entertaining, but it’s an entertainment of substance. The rhetoric of her rapid flight through ideas, anecdotes and assertions owes as much to stand-up comedy as to the poetic tradition. She finds the humor in almost everything, and then keeps going to find the sadness, as when she writes, “Whoever tied the Mylar birthday balloon to the dead squirrel on Main Street thinks big.” Death, she reminds the reader, is everywhere, and it’s going to get us all. That reminder becomes a bizarre relief, spoken by a brilliantly blunt poet whose subtle pleasures cannot — and should not — be ignored.
November 16, 2017
Jennifer Knox’s Days of Shame & Failure is her fourth collection of poetry, and the most recent work in her ongoing collection. While it is found in the poetry section of local bookstores and libraries, this book is genre-bending from the start. Some of the poems appear with formal lineation and rhyming, while just as many are prose poems. Sandwiched in between these are poems that seem more like flash fiction in the compact way they tell a story and don’t resemble any of the other poetry of the book. Knox calls it poetry and so I do too. Whatever you call it, this is a collection worth reading and adding to your shelf, whatever shelf that may be.
November 5, 2015
This book is pretty great! My review here: http://weird-sister.com/2015/11/04/we...
April 10, 2019
I was lucky enough to hear Jennifer L. Knox read from this book while I was reading it. That obviously enhanced my reading and made me enjoy these pieces way more, I think, than I would have otherwise. I usually fly through poetry collections, but something about these pieces slowed me way down. I decided to go with it and sit with these and I think that's necessary for a collection like this. I don't know if I would have chosen to read this collection on my own, but I enjoyed it and can definitely see why Jennifer L. Knox is so loved.
October 27, 2025
You have to contort your mind in all new ways to understand each poem. It's such a favor to the reader to demand fresh, immediate attention. So envious of the breadth of this collection. The first lines! The Ashbery-ness!***
**** Patricia Smith's blurb does a better job than I have here of giving this collection it's due
**** Patricia Smith's blurb does a better job than I have here of giving this collection it's due
April 4, 2019
Funniest and most language-rich book of poetry I've read in a long time. Maybe ever. I rarely think of poetry as having the potential to be hilarious. Not anymore. Every line has either a laugh or a surprise on the language level, and 90% of the lines have both.
February 15, 2025
Very few poets handle humor as well as Jennifer L. Knox. Absurdist yet heartfelt. Off her rocker and then brutally grounded in reality. Every poem has the potential to make me laugh and also cry. I adore this collection, one I had to re-read after being away from it for too many years.
November 20, 2018
JLK is required reading, y'all.
March 23, 2019
Review to come!
December 11, 2021
I didn’t want to finish this collection so badly that I read it over the course of almost 2 years 🤓 I love Jennifer Knox
February 7, 2025
Delightful
February 8, 2016
Absurd, hilarious poetry for the end of the world.
Jennifer Knox's world is populated with people who don't quite measure up, things that couldn't possibly happen, and uncomfortable situations you've probably been in. Sometimes the absurdity is palpable, as in "The Decorative Airport Fern is Not What it Pretends to Be" or "The Ten Million Year War." Then there's the "can you even believe this world we live in?" ethos in poems like "I Want to Speak With the Manager" and "Me Time." It's as if Knox watched Idiocracy and thought to herself, "I can work with this." You get the sense that we're on a long, downward spiral towards chaos, so you might as well laugh and be ridiculous while you can. Every now and again you even win one, as in "Ladies Night/Feeling Right." If you're in the mood for poetry that will make you laugh, scratch your head, and wonder, this is a good volume to pick up. Anyone who must have their poetry polite and comfortable, however, will not be able to deal.
Jennifer Knox's world is populated with people who don't quite measure up, things that couldn't possibly happen, and uncomfortable situations you've probably been in. Sometimes the absurdity is palpable, as in "The Decorative Airport Fern is Not What it Pretends to Be" or "The Ten Million Year War." Then there's the "can you even believe this world we live in?" ethos in poems like "I Want to Speak With the Manager" and "Me Time." It's as if Knox watched Idiocracy and thought to herself, "I can work with this." You get the sense that we're on a long, downward spiral towards chaos, so you might as well laugh and be ridiculous while you can. Every now and again you even win one, as in "Ladies Night/Feeling Right." If you're in the mood for poetry that will make you laugh, scratch your head, and wonder, this is a good volume to pick up. Anyone who must have their poetry polite and comfortable, however, will not be able to deal.
December 27, 2015
If you have even the slightest passing fancy for poetry, I recommend that you read this book immediately. Humorous, poignant, heartfelt, visionary...and why are you even still reading this? Go get the book!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews