Red Ocher

by Jessica Poli

Finalist, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher , the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2023

About the author

Jessica Poli is the author of Red Ocher, which was a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Originally from Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Reviews

[Hannah D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. One of the best collections I’ve read this year!

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is so contemplative and quiet, even when it evaluates how death roars all around us all the time. Especially loved the poems about farms and farm animals.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the heart of Poli’s book is being left by a man. Or the event has been figured as an individual man leaving her, but it might be a handful of different men. And the poems are more about the dramatics of heartbreak, the romantic overwhelm of experiencing it, the isolation, especially how it gets emphasized by the prairie landscape. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role romanticism might play in poetry. Where, for instance, a poem could be read as this subjective exploration around moments we know will continue to reverberate through our lives. And in poems like these what should the poems be read for? Should they be read for their reflective qualities, how the observations and metaphors cast light on the primary subject? Should I be thinking about the figurative position of death in the poems, especially a possible analogy between processing heartbreak and killing the animals around her farm? Should the poet’s thoughts on these mercy killings be about finally severing the connection to this chorus of male figures lurking in her dreams? Should it be read as what the man has done to her, where she thinks of herself as the farm animal caught by circumstance?

I’m interested in this kind of reading, because once I’m invested in it, it overtakes any other lens. I find other readings feel misplaced, maybe even superficial. They don’t feel as consequential to the work as that romantic reading. It’s a position I would relate to Poli’s own experience with poetry, or how her explicit nod to the language of other poets’ poems relate to her own experiences. Given the cento is a key form for her book.

In fact, perhaps this point is what complicates my Romantic reading of Poli’s work. Because while the subject of personhood, and the life events that shape that personhood, are the central driver of these poems, Poli’s use of the cento pull a reader into a differently layered reading—perhaps adjacent to the first-person subject-position the non-cento poems present. For my own reading, I’ll admit I fold the material in the centos into that first-person approach. Where the book runs in series with an opening section describing the lyrically charged wound caused by the man leaving. A section about her girlhood and what that might say about how she relates with men. The heightened consideration of hurt in this first-person speaker is assuredly the primary reading the book leads me to. But there are also explicit gestures to language that complicate the book’s reading. These centos, even a whole section that is absent language, being made only of footnotes.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about nature, relationships - both with people and with animals, desire, violence, and survival.

from Balm: "And here I'll admit that, in my head, / I'm already writing this poem—have already // arrived at the image of the shit / blooming on my shirt like a flower // or a patch of green lichen. / And I've looked at her throat // and thought about how I would cut it / if I had to, if her suffering // grew larger than what her body / could contain"

from Prothalamion: "Do you think it will feel like / a holy act knowing how often // holiness shrouds violence"

from Ode to Seventh-Grade Girls: "O girls made of gristle / and glitter, born carrying small funerals in their bellies— / who all knew that one day the evidence might smear itself / across a yellow plastic chair"

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jessica Poli's 2018 chapbook Canyons remains one of my favorite books to hold. It's a stunning collection of tiny poems on thick handmade paper. Her debut full-length, Red Ocher, continues this lineage of tender and touching poems. Meditative and ambient. This book is the opposite of a metropolis. Sunrise reflections with a steady supply of sleepless centos, reminding the reader that the words and poetics of others are swirling throughout this open field of an atmospheric collection.

[Corissa Gay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a peculiar collection in the sense that I found sixty to seventy percent of these poems nice-if-bland and the remaining poems some of the best I've had the pleasure of experiencing.

Shoutout to "Field of View" in particular for radicalizing what form can mean for an individual poem & poetry at large for me. I'll be thinking about her for the rest of my life.

[Anne Louise Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the chance to meet the author on my college campus, and she was incredibly nice. I’m a fan of pastoral poetry, in general, possibly because I grew up in a very rural area. This takes an unapologetic look at farm life and rural life, and captures it in ways both beautiful and sad.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful.

[Eldina Dedagic · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When you left,
I dreamed a mirror in the sky was burning.
I dreamed the red moon told me how to love."