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Stateside: Poems
Although the poems in Stateside are concerned with a husband's deployment to the war in Iraq, Jehanne Dubrow's riveting collection is driven more by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration than by any overt political agenda. The speaker in these poems attempts to understand her situation within the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder - "Penelope" is a model, but also a source of mystery. These poems are dazzling in their use of form, their sensual imagery, and their learnedness, and possess a level of subtlety and control rarely found in the work of a young poet. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war, but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress.
72 pages, Hardcover
First published March 29, 2010
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About the author
Jehanne Dubrow
24 books35 followersJehanne Dubrow is the author of nine books of poetry, including most recently, Wild Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) and a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her previous poetry collections are American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post. She has co-edited two anthologies, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume and Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse.
Jehanne's poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is the founding editor of the literary journal, Cherry Tree.
Jehanne earned a B.A. in the "Great Books" from St. John's College, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In her free time, she is currently earning another MFA—this time in creative nonfiction—from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Diode Editions Book Contest, the Editors' Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The daughter of American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Vicenza, Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She lives in Denton with her two Bedlington Terriers, Lola and Bandit, and with her husband, Jeremy, who recently retired from a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy. Jehanne is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
Jehanne's poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is the founding editor of the literary journal, Cherry Tree.
Jehanne earned a B.A. in the "Great Books" from St. John's College, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In her free time, she is currently earning another MFA—this time in creative nonfiction—from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Diode Editions Book Contest, the Editors' Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The daughter of American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Vicenza, Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She lives in Denton with her two Bedlington Terriers, Lola and Bandit, and with her husband, Jeremy, who recently retired from a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy. Jehanne is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 13, 2011
Author of two previous books, From the Fever-World¬ (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) and The Hardship Post (Three Candles Press) and a chapbook of poetry, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press), Jehanne Dubrow’s third book Stateside focuses on the emotional tides of the milspouse experience. Here we find Penelope stateside while the marriage bed waits with “branches splayed/ like fingers,” “glum /suitors” via for her affection, Telemachus tantrums at the mall “his voice an ambulance/ at siren pitch”, and the family pooch lifts his head “to sight each ship”.
But Penelope is not the antiquated Penelope of The Odyssey alone, but a contemporary metaphor for and lyrical chronicle of military life for wives who remain while their loves are deployed elsewhere and when together again, how the couple traverses those distances created by time apart, by promise of future separation, and by fear of death, as Dubrow writes, “We’re arguing about his death again.” But these are navigatable waters, for Dubrow offers readers poems such as “A Short Study of Catastrophe,” “Instructions for Other Penelopes,” and “On the Erotics of Deployment.”
In Stateside, one is “hardly a ship lost in the storm.”
But Penelope is not the antiquated Penelope of The Odyssey alone, but a contemporary metaphor for and lyrical chronicle of military life for wives who remain while their loves are deployed elsewhere and when together again, how the couple traverses those distances created by time apart, by promise of future separation, and by fear of death, as Dubrow writes, “We’re arguing about his death again.” But these are navigatable waters, for Dubrow offers readers poems such as “A Short Study of Catastrophe,” “Instructions for Other Penelopes,” and “On the Erotics of Deployment.”
In Stateside, one is “hardly a ship lost in the storm.”
March 19, 2010
Personally, I think that Jehanne Dubrow's third collection of poetry is her best. Stateside explores a wife's feelings about her husband's deployment. Small warning: if readers are expecting a strong political collection of poetry, they will be disappointed. In fact, Dubrow's does not have a political agenda -- the speaker in this poem seeks to explore her own life through other histories and mythologies of military wives. My favorite poem is the one that starts out the collection, "Secure for Sea" where the speaker says, "At home, we say secure/when what we mean is letting go/of him. And even if we're sure/he's coming back, it's hard to know/the farther out a vessel drifts/will contents stay in place, or shift?"
However, I have to say that the middle section of this collection is stunning: The speaker weaves tales of the mythical heroine, Penelope through both explorations of personal feelings and contemporary settings. For those of you who enjoy persona poetic explorations of past female figures, this section is a must for you.
However, I have to say that the middle section of this collection is stunning: The speaker weaves tales of the mythical heroine, Penelope through both explorations of personal feelings and contemporary settings. For those of you who enjoy persona poetic explorations of past female figures, this section is a must for you.
April 19, 2010
A gorgeous interweaving of the Penelope/ Odysseus story with the joys and frustrations of a modern-day military wife. Dubrow's grasp of form is matched by her attention to image and the emotional nuances of language. A gorgeous book.
August 12, 2012
Beautiful & heart-wrenching. Real & raw look at being the one left behind.
August 29, 2022
Home Front: A Different Kind of War Poetry
Many excellent poetry books deal with war from the point of view of the participants, but rarely does one find an examination of the life of the military spouse left behind during deployment. Stateside by Jehanne Dubrow is a gripping, thoughtful, and unsparing portrait of the author's responses to separation, anxiety, stress, longing, and the often prickly friction of reunion.
The book has three sections, which are roughly divided into before, during, and after the deployment. In the first section, Dubrow catalogues the fears, dreams, and preparations before her husband's departure. In the nightmarish sonnet "Against War Movies" she runs through all the war movies she has seen, imagining that she sees her husband in every character who is killed: "Each movie is a training exercise, / a scenario for how my husband dies." In the second section, Dubrow uses The Odyssey as a lens for viewing her life while her husband is gone, but this Penelope diets, gets a new haircut, fends off passes from divorcés, walks the dog Argos, takes Telemachus to the mall. Both of the first two sections are highly effective, but my favorite is the third section, which faces up unblinkingly to the difficulties of re-entry after a long absence, each spouse newly awkward around the other.
The feelings are both raw and nuanced in these poems, and Dubrow's technical mastery of the wide variety of forms--blank verse, rhymed quatrains, triplets, couplets, sonnets, nonce forms--acts as a sort of protective gear for handling potentially explosive emotions. Her approach to form is flexible, often using loose rhythms and slant rhymes. Thought and feeling do not cancel each other out in the poems, but pull against each other with a tension that also creates a bridge.
Many excellent poetry books deal with war from the point of view of the participants, but rarely does one find an examination of the life of the military spouse left behind during deployment. Stateside by Jehanne Dubrow is a gripping, thoughtful, and unsparing portrait of the author's responses to separation, anxiety, stress, longing, and the often prickly friction of reunion.
The book has three sections, which are roughly divided into before, during, and after the deployment. In the first section, Dubrow catalogues the fears, dreams, and preparations before her husband's departure. In the nightmarish sonnet "Against War Movies" she runs through all the war movies she has seen, imagining that she sees her husband in every character who is killed: "Each movie is a training exercise, / a scenario for how my husband dies." In the second section, Dubrow uses The Odyssey as a lens for viewing her life while her husband is gone, but this Penelope diets, gets a new haircut, fends off passes from divorcés, walks the dog Argos, takes Telemachus to the mall. Both of the first two sections are highly effective, but my favorite is the third section, which faces up unblinkingly to the difficulties of re-entry after a long absence, each spouse newly awkward around the other.
The feelings are both raw and nuanced in these poems, and Dubrow's technical mastery of the wide variety of forms--blank verse, rhymed quatrains, triplets, couplets, sonnets, nonce forms--acts as a sort of protective gear for handling potentially explosive emotions. Her approach to form is flexible, often using loose rhythms and slant rhymes. Thought and feeling do not cancel each other out in the poems, but pull against each other with a tension that also creates a bridge.
August 23, 2018
I don't normally read poetry, for any number of reasons. I chose this book for a veteran's book group I'm running at work, though, so I had to read it. It isn't available in our library system so I'm about 99% sure I'm the only one who will read it. So I bought it, I read it, and then I had to put my heart back together. Wow is the only word I can think of to describe it, and wow doesn't come close.
I came of age, so to speak, as a too-young wife and mother in the Navy, and Jehanne Dubrow is the other sort of Navy wife and mother - the one who isn't on active duty. But I remember the first days after the fleet left; eating chocolate pie to try to fill the empty spots, avoiding looks in the commissary, finding signs in everything from the way the toilet paper tears to the shape of a cloud. It's 25 years in my past, and another (MUCH shorter) war, but I remember. Dubrow brought those memories to life with her words. With her beautiful rhythms and unexpected rhymes, she showed me that the life of the one left behind in a deployment has not really changed all that much from one generation to the next.
I cannot wait to share this with the other veterans, most of whom I am assuming will be from a generation or two before me. World War II, Korea, Viet Nam... was it the same for them? Are these feelings universal?
I came of age, so to speak, as a too-young wife and mother in the Navy, and Jehanne Dubrow is the other sort of Navy wife and mother - the one who isn't on active duty. But I remember the first days after the fleet left; eating chocolate pie to try to fill the empty spots, avoiding looks in the commissary, finding signs in everything from the way the toilet paper tears to the shape of a cloud. It's 25 years in my past, and another (MUCH shorter) war, but I remember. Dubrow brought those memories to life with her words. With her beautiful rhythms and unexpected rhymes, she showed me that the life of the one left behind in a deployment has not really changed all that much from one generation to the next.
I cannot wait to share this with the other veterans, most of whom I am assuming will be from a generation or two before me. World War II, Korea, Viet Nam... was it the same for them? Are these feelings universal?
August 12, 2025
A collection of poems about being a military spouse, deployment, desire, and love.
from Ithaca: "And home remains a metaphor / for something else: a wife who tries / to guard her chastity, ties / it like a yellow ribbon to her door, // sticks it to the bumper of / her car, so that the neighbors know / she sleeps alone, almost a widow / to the Trojan War, her love // preserved in plastic wrap like some / dessert too beautiful to taste."
from Penelope Considers a New 'Do: "The magazines declare don't ever cut / your hair just after breaking up. So what / if he's been absent nearly twenty years? / Fact is: each day the loss feels new, the shears // still biting as the first time they'd been honed. / Looks like he's never coming back. You've moaned / for two decades about the shroud of bangs / which veils your face, the way your ponytail hangs // down your back like a ragged piece of rope."
from Ithaca: "And home remains a metaphor / for something else: a wife who tries / to guard her chastity, ties / it like a yellow ribbon to her door, // sticks it to the bumper of / her car, so that the neighbors know / she sleeps alone, almost a widow / to the Trojan War, her love // preserved in plastic wrap like some / dessert too beautiful to taste."
from Penelope Considers a New 'Do: "The magazines declare don't ever cut / your hair just after breaking up. So what / if he's been absent nearly twenty years? / Fact is: each day the loss feels new, the shears // still biting as the first time they'd been honed. / Looks like he's never coming back. You've moaned / for two decades about the shroud of bangs / which veils your face, the way your ponytail hangs // down your back like a ragged piece of rope."
September 17, 2018
It's a book of sad, sad poems, from the forward by Ted Kooser in which he wrote about the sweaters knitted by fishermen wives, the function of the uniqueness of each sweater: the identification of the fisherman by his wife when his body washes is at shore. The fishman's widow could be Penelope whose Odysseus is lost at sea, Odysseus could be a modern man in the navy who isn't allowed to bring enough reminders of his wife and pet.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 7, 2018
Actual rating: 3.5 stars
Full review here - https://charmainelimen.wordpress.com/...
Full review here - https://charmainelimen.wordpress.com/...
July 11, 2012
A friend of mine asked me if I'd read Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside, a collection of incredibly poignant poems penned by a Navy wife while her husband was deployed. The poems aren't syrupy, sentimental reflections. Instead, many military spouses will find Jehanne's poems have an eerie familiarity. Read the rest of this review at http://blogcritics.org/books/article/...
October 10, 2012
There's a lot to admire about Dubrow's collection of poems--they capture the experiences of the 'war bride' left STATESIDE with deft craft and strong prosody, but some of the allusions seem obvious and thus offer less for the reader (i.e., Penelope just seems obvious). Dubrow's skill with form is admirable, but sometimes the rhyme gave the poems a militancy that perhaps belied the emotional messiness she was trying to bring to bear.
May 3, 2018
Mostly good. The rhyming felt lazy/unnecessary at times and the points/descriptions/metaphors seemed clunky and undeveloped in many of the same poems. Generally a good collection, I had a fun time quickly reading the thing, but I'm not going to get too much value out of rereading it or chasing down her other work. 7/10 I guess.
April 13, 2017
This volume of poetry tells of a wife's life while her husband is deployed, her loneliness, fear, and dread. She also has several pieces about the difficulties of reintegration, the sense, even still, of isolation and aloneness that is perhaps more pronounced once he is home. These poems are especially pleasing because in many ways they deal with ordinary daily life, the little details, dramas, and routines with which we pass our time.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews