Spilled and Gone: Poems

by Jessica Greenbaum

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."
At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?" A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum "spills" details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published April 16, 2019

About the author

Jessica Greenbaum is an American poet. Her first book, Inventing Difficulty (1998), won the Gerald Cable Prize. Her second book, The Two Yvonnes (2012), was chosen by Paul Muldoon for Princeton’s Series of Contemporary Poets. She is the poetry editor for upstreet and lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm so glad I bought this book, wherever I bought, whyever I bought it.
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My only real issue with this book is the punctuation of the poems; each first line capped is a no-no for me, but also some poems don't have finishing periods, some are missing commas where they should be, which is certainly all an effect, but it's confusing when there is punctuation used elsewhere in the same poem and some places it's not.
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Anyway.
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The poems here are such mundane/inane moments that are dived into and magnified into something more urgent, important; the images are bright and lively, even when the tone is not, and the analogies/similies, whatever they are, are so interesting and feel unique to this poet, but also very relatable. It's quite a nice trick.
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Many of these poems are also just single sentences, quite long and meandering; they remind me of Carl Phillips, but much more open and loose than his. Each poem is a journey that starts in one place and wanders down the page to someplace else, or often, too, back to the same place, just presented in a different light. I feel that this book offers a lot to be learned from for poets, there's quite a lot of work being done here. Well worth the read.
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I'm putting this one back on the shelf to be read later, sooner rather than.

[Jason Koo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It reminds you of what poetry should be but so rarely is.