Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going

by Jessica Jacobs

A memoir-in-poems about coming of age in sultry Florida and navigating a complex lesbian relationship grounded in the daily world.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

128 pages, Paperback

Published March 4, 2019

About the author

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Goldie Award in Poetry from the Golden Crown Literary Society, and a finalist for both the Brockman-Campbell and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Julie Suk Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and is now the Chapbook Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Reviews

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really lovely collection of poems that trace a love that--to be perfectly honest, feels very foreign to me. I feel like a robot compared to this kind of passion and commitment, so wonderfully expressed, wrought into beautiful poems. I don't really know, anymore, how people do this kind of love, so it felt a bit anthropological, sociological, to see it, its fights and tenderness, its grief and glory, bound together in so fine a knot. It made me wonder if I'm a human at all, which is, of course, among the most human things to wonder about.

[Camille Dungy]

So much to love about the love Jessica Jacobs writes into this book. The grown-up love—in which the speaker at the center of these poems finds the woman with whom she intends to spend her whole life—but also love for the child who would become the love-full speaker one day. Love for the Florida brine and bracken and alligator ponds and turtles and all their many instructions. Sometimes we caution writers against using the greater-than-human world as an example of what it means to be human. The dead turtle on the road is just a turtle. Not a rune to turn to for the meaning of life. And, yet, sometimes the world does seem to speak to us, to speak through us, in deeply charged ways. That’s part of how metaphor works. A poet takes an example from the real world, lays it against a story from her own life, and lets the marriage of the two create a new reality that, rather than erasing previous realities, magnifies what has been there all along. Page after page, Jessica Jacobs does just that in Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going. What a delight it is to read the world through her eyes.

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/06/pri...

[Dev · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I will always have a hard time with poetry. I don't connect well to imagery. While I didn't connect to the first part of Take Me With You, Wherever You're Going, I did understand it. I wasn't drawn in, but I wasn't lost the way I was with Ross and Donnelly's books.

I started connecting to the poems around where Jessica and her partner start connecting - that first hospital visit. I was pulled in more during "Curly, My Tangler." I was surprised by "Kina Hora", because up until that point there was no indication that Jessica was Jewish. Once the cancer scare began, I saw Kina Hora as a bad omen. "Curly, My Tangler" and "Kina Hora," put together, were foreshadowing cancer. I was sure that by the end of the book Jessica's wife was going to die, and that this book of poetry was Jessica's way of grieving. For me, that added tension to "In the Days Between Detection and Diagnosis." I was pleasantly surprised when the tumor turned out to be benign, but I'm left wondering along with Jessica and her wife (is she ever named?) - what about the next tumor?

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through poems that vary and explore many permutations of length, line, shape, and structure, Jacobs has gifted readers an extraordinarily generous and incisive series of looks at how two lives come to be as one; how what sustains us as we grow can be what we use to hold on to those we love, and how our loved ones’ differences from ourselves can open us up to a whole other half of the universe. In these poems, the two are just that: halves of a single universe. (I am struck while writing this the makeup of that word; “uni”—one—and “verse,” the medium of these works. How perfect for these poems, the relationship they illuminate.)

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a first-rate collection of evocative and imagistic poetry throughout. Jacobs has a wonderful sense of language and phrasing that is fresh and lively. She shows herself to be more than capable with the short lyric poems and in more sustained sequences. All-around, it’s just fine, compelling writing.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A memoir in poems” that spans from the speaker’s adolescence to her marriage. The poems are funny, technically skilled, and unflinchingly attentive. A book I’m constantly recommending to friends looking for new poems.

[AGP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems inspired me into action, and can you really ask for anything more from a work of literature?

[David Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredibly beautiful collection of poems and what a moving love story. This one touched me, and I absolutely cannot wait to read more from this poet.

[Emma Oppenheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The loveliest little book of poems

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of poetry that focuses on the poet's love for her wife, along with life in general and the challenges, hardships, and joy of being a lesbian.

From Sex Ed: "their lust / answered, each writhing creature partnered; / their desire so singular, their purpose was / obvious: they didn't even have mouths to feed."

From I Can't Write the Poem About How We Met: "Because whether a story is happy / or not depends on when you end it."

From Elopement Epithalamium: "Each of us / holding the hand of the most / stubborn person we knew, the only one capable / of wrenching the other / greater than sum of her parts."

Overall, this collection of poems is a testament to her love for her wife and the poems are written beautifully and full of emotion without being sentimental. When I finished the book all I could think was "I want to be loved by Jessica Jacobs!" Do yourself a favor, read this book or buy it for someone you love. It's a great read.