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Dots & Dashes
Moving between the languages of love and war, Jehanne Dubrow’s latest book offers valuable testimony to the experiences of military wives. Frequently employing rhyme, meter, and traditional forms, these poems examine what it means to be both a military spouse and an academic, straddling two communities that speak in very different and often conflicting terms.
As in the poet’s earlier collection, Stateside, the poems in Dots & Dashes are explicitly feminist, exploring the experiences of women whose husbands are deployed. But, while Stateside looked to masculine stories of war, Dots & Dashes incorporates the views and voices of female poets who have written about combat. Looking to Sappho and Emily Dickinson, the poet considers how the act of writing allows her autonomy and agency rarely granted to military spouses, even in the twenty-first century. Dubrow catalogs the domestic life of a military spouse, illustrating what it is like to live in a tightly constructed world of rules and regulations, ceremony and tradition, where “every sacrifice already / knows its place.”
Navigating the rough seas of marriage alongside questions about how civilians and those in the military can learn to communicate with one another, Dubrow argues for compassion and empathy on both sides. In this timely collection, Dubrow offers the hope that if we can break apart our preconceptions and stereotypes, we can find what connects all of us.
As in the poet’s earlier collection, Stateside, the poems in Dots & Dashes are explicitly feminist, exploring the experiences of women whose husbands are deployed. But, while Stateside looked to masculine stories of war, Dots & Dashes incorporates the views and voices of female poets who have written about combat. Looking to Sappho and Emily Dickinson, the poet considers how the act of writing allows her autonomy and agency rarely granted to military spouses, even in the twenty-first century. Dubrow catalogs the domestic life of a military spouse, illustrating what it is like to live in a tightly constructed world of rules and regulations, ceremony and tradition, where “every sacrifice already / knows its place.”
Navigating the rough seas of marriage alongside questions about how civilians and those in the military can learn to communicate with one another, Dubrow argues for compassion and empathy on both sides. In this timely collection, Dubrow offers the hope that if we can break apart our preconceptions and stereotypes, we can find what connects all of us.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published August 7, 2017
2 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
About the author
Jehanne Dubrow
24 books35 followersJehanne Dubrow is the author of nine books of poetry, including most recently, Wild Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) and a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her previous poetry collections are American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post. She has co-edited two anthologies, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume and Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse.
Jehanne's poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is the founding editor of the literary journal, Cherry Tree.
Jehanne earned a B.A. in the "Great Books" from St. John's College, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In her free time, she is currently earning another MFA—this time in creative nonfiction—from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Diode Editions Book Contest, the Editors' Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The daughter of American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Vicenza, Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She lives in Denton with her two Bedlington Terriers, Lola and Bandit, and with her husband, Jeremy, who recently retired from a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy. Jehanne is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
Jehanne's poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is the founding editor of the literary journal, Cherry Tree.
Jehanne earned a B.A. in the "Great Books" from St. John's College, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In her free time, she is currently earning another MFA—this time in creative nonfiction—from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Diode Editions Book Contest, the Editors' Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The daughter of American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Vicenza, Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She lives in Denton with her two Bedlington Terriers, Lola and Bandit, and with her husband, Jeremy, who recently retired from a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy. Jehanne is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 29, 2022
Parallel Universes: Dispatches from the Military Marriage Front
Dubrow’s poetry book Stateside felt like a series of revelations about the realities of being a military spouse before, during, and after a husband’s deployment to war, but in Dots & Dashes she tackles the military marriage over the long haul. Short-term stresses are trying, but there is an end in prospect, if not in sight. The harder adjustment is to the realization that the strains between the obligations of military life and the expectations of a civilian wife are never going to lessen. Dubrow does not try to lessen them. She is alive to the tension, ache, and irony of every situation, from recognizing the only other “dependent” in the audience (“coral / in a sea of khaki”) while giving a poetry reading at the Naval War College, to being called “shipmate” by her husband when he dresses her down for making a mistake, to hearing a famous poet refer to soldiers as “babykillers” (“At the Reading of the Antiwar Poets, 2007”).
The poems range from free verse to sonnets to rhymed quatrains to a villanelle. They also range in emotion from the wry humor of “Poem,” in which she imagines her husband writing a “POEM / (Personal Observation Encased in Metaphor)” so as to make it perfectly clear, to “[Lament for this Long Celibacy],” in which the poet imagines herself as a Pink Lady apple abandoned on a plate and slowly going soft, to sympathetic identification with a range of others, from the war widow to the combat veteran who posts a sign on the Fourth of July asking others “Please Be Courteous with Fireworks.” I particularly enjoy the way in which Dubrow turns the minutiae of Navy life (signal flags, the Beaufort Scale for measuring wind speed, uniforms--“full dress blues”--into metaphors for marriage). The whole collection is intelligent, literate (some of the poems are in conversation with works by Sappho, Ovid, Jane Austen, Raymond Carver, Stephen Crane, and others), and moving. Although it has much to offer those who are themselves military spouses and who look in vain for some acknowledgment of their experiences in most poetry, this book is just as relevant and relatable to those who have no idea of the parallel universe that is life in the military.
Dubrow’s poetry book Stateside felt like a series of revelations about the realities of being a military spouse before, during, and after a husband’s deployment to war, but in Dots & Dashes she tackles the military marriage over the long haul. Short-term stresses are trying, but there is an end in prospect, if not in sight. The harder adjustment is to the realization that the strains between the obligations of military life and the expectations of a civilian wife are never going to lessen. Dubrow does not try to lessen them. She is alive to the tension, ache, and irony of every situation, from recognizing the only other “dependent” in the audience (“coral / in a sea of khaki”) while giving a poetry reading at the Naval War College, to being called “shipmate” by her husband when he dresses her down for making a mistake, to hearing a famous poet refer to soldiers as “babykillers” (“At the Reading of the Antiwar Poets, 2007”).
The poems range from free verse to sonnets to rhymed quatrains to a villanelle. They also range in emotion from the wry humor of “Poem,” in which she imagines her husband writing a “POEM / (Personal Observation Encased in Metaphor)” so as to make it perfectly clear, to “[Lament for this Long Celibacy],” in which the poet imagines herself as a Pink Lady apple abandoned on a plate and slowly going soft, to sympathetic identification with a range of others, from the war widow to the combat veteran who posts a sign on the Fourth of July asking others “Please Be Courteous with Fireworks.” I particularly enjoy the way in which Dubrow turns the minutiae of Navy life (signal flags, the Beaufort Scale for measuring wind speed, uniforms--“full dress blues”--into metaphors for marriage). The whole collection is intelligent, literate (some of the poems are in conversation with works by Sappho, Ovid, Jane Austen, Raymond Carver, Stephen Crane, and others), and moving. Although it has much to offer those who are themselves military spouses and who look in vain for some acknowledgment of their experiences in most poetry, this book is just as relevant and relatable to those who have no idea of the parallel universe that is life in the military.
August 15, 2017
Jehanne Dubrow’s newest collection, Dot & Dashes, masterfully plays with the military’s attempts of simplifying and standardizing communication. Morse code and signal flags may work in a theater of war, but it’s poetry like Dubrow’s that elucidates what is actually being fought for. With her almost shape-shifting power of being both intimate and far-gazing, Dubrow examines the difficulty of communication between man and woman, military and civilian, service member and academic. Dots & Dashes acts as a sequel to her earlier, iconic Stateside; the narrators of Dots & Dashes, like those of Stateside, are often full of longing, but this more mature want is weary, wary, more empathetic from too many deployments, and there is a sense that the skirmishes within a marriage can be just as uncertain and gouging as any long separation.
Written with the intensity and honesty that makes Dubrow one of our greatest poets, the brilliance of Dots & Dashes reads loud and clear.
Written with the intensity and honesty that makes Dubrow one of our greatest poets, the brilliance of Dots & Dashes reads loud and clear.
April 5, 2018
This book feels like a kindred spirit.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews