From

by Jill Osier

Poetry. Jill Osier, winner of the 2017 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, returns to Bull City Press with a new chapbook.




"These poems shine with the deep intelligence of gentleness and of a quiet, sustained concern. To read them is to be reminded of Robert Creeley's passionate advocacy of Hart Crane, a passion that reached crescendo in the exclamation (in a letter to Charles Olson) 'Dammit, isn't that gentle!' Here is a poet whose primary commitment is to attention, a poet who simultaneously understands and avows that attention is now and ever shall be the vivid prime of Love. I neither blush nor hesitate to say that such avowal is literally angelic. This poet's 'Requiem' gently but unequivocally proposes point-of-view as an angelic imperative, gentle on its very 'Try / to remember the smell of sun through it all. It's / a rare courtship.' Love courts attention, and attention in return is both courted and empowered by love. The upshot? 'There was a beating / of silence then, until it was a new quiet...' It is the bright substance of this 'new quiet' I am happy to welcome and to acknowledge. It is surely the peaceable frontier of joy."--Donald Revell

Genres: Poetry

30 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2018

About the author

Originally from northeast Iowa, Jill Osier has worked as a writer, laborer, and educator, much of the time in Iowa and Alaska. She holds a BA from Luther College and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her work has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship, a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Award, and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t appreciate this book enough the first time I read it so I’m updating my review. I reread these poems every time I’m struggling to find inspiration to write because Osier is so good it makes me want to be just like her. Huge fan of this one.

“Sounds beyond love, / sounds beyond love… Remember, I would tell her, / there are such things.”

<33

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

From what are we made? More exactly, whence? What are the elements of ourselves, our selfhoods, that come from where we come from? This book, a meditation, perhaps, on a small town, perhaps, in Iowa, perhaps, paints a self-portrait that asks us to do the same for ourselves. Calls forth that self-portrait in ourselves, actually.

Okay, so I accidentally deleted all my quotes and don't feel I have the time today to retype.

This collection challenges me personally to rethink myself as coming from somewhere, from a rural hometown of my own that might once have been a home containing a "we," rather than a place where I left, at great escape velocity, people, whom I consider a they, "behind." I don't know if I can do this yet.

[Amy]

Favorite poems:

Edge of the World: I like the specificity of the named people and the time period (the speaker's youth).

September: Reads like flash fiction. Nice conversational tone.

Pony: I like the jumble of time, suggesting the mother was often melancholy during the "violet hour" while the specific moment of the pony incident appears to be the main trigger.

Vespers: I like that the images ARE the poem.