White: Poems

by Jennifer O'Grady

Award-winning volume of poetry

61 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Jennifer O’Grady is an award-winning poet and playwright. She is the author of the poetry collections WHITE (Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry) and EXCLUSIONS & LIMITATIONS (Plume Editions/MatHat Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in numerous places including Harper’s, The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, The Yale Review and American Poetry: The Next Generation, to name a few. Her plays have won the Henley Rose Award, the NEWvember Festival Dublin and MTWorks NEWborn Festival awards and Heartland Theatre's 10-Minute Play Contest and are published in The Best Ten-Minute Plays, The Best Women's Stage Monologues, and Best Contemporary Monologues for Women anthologies. Born and raised in New York City, she holds a BA from Vassar, where she won awards for her writing, and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives near New York City with her husband, son, and daughter, two dogs, two cats, and a rabbit.

Reviews

[Suzanne Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me say up front that I know O'Grady personally, and don't pretend to be a purely objective outside reader. That said, I rarely review books by those I know, and do so here simply because the book is worthy of attention. I love O'Grady's work, which is precise, spare, perceptive, subtle, and poignant. She has both the capacity to imagine her way into varied worlds--there are excellent poems here that touch on Buster Keaton, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Native American captivity narratives, for example--and the ability to write well about experiences closer to home. The nature and workings of love, the function of art, and the liminal and sometimes lonely spaces between people are themes that arise often, with subtle and satisfying variation from poem to poem. The work is sometimes sad, but--something I admire--never stumbles into the maudlin, the self-pitying, or the showy; there's great strength as well. I particularly love the poems about marriage and those that juxtapose existing external texts with the poet's own words, but there are riches throughout. I often like writers who combine restraint with strong emotional resonance, and O'Grady does, in poems that repay re-readings over time.