Gates & Fields

by Jennifer Firestone

Poetry. Women's Studies. In dialogue with Emily Dickinson and other voices from the past, GATES & FIELDS maps a poetics of meditation and disjuncture, where loss is inconceivable and language, faith, and the rituals of grief fall short. GATES & FIELDS demands an attention to the dead, the dying, and those left behind.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2017

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spare, rigorous, poignant, Jennifer Firestone’s Gates & Fields unsparingly reveals things we’ve seen yet haven’t seen, seemingly known things—like tree, sky, stone, wood, bone, gate, field, seed, earth, moon, sun, star, eye, snow, light, bird, air, egg, skin, door, heart, brain, cloud, ice, and sea—each of these familiar things made unfamiliar and newly illuminated in poems that suggest Sapphic fragments, erasures of Dickinson lines, and traces of lost stories.

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly this book feels so far beyond mere gates and fields that the title is simply the introduction, the lead in, the draw. The language of the protagonistic voice is one of certainty, a certainty of experience, a certainty of the lived moment. There is definition here. There is definition and there is voice. The book weaves in and out and could be read cyclically from back to front as it is typically read front to back. An astute set of poems and poemites.