Bad Boats

by Laura Jensen

GREAT BOOK.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1977

About the author

Poet Laura Jensen was born in Tacoma, Washington, where she continues to reside. She received her BA at the University of Washington, where she studied with poets David Wagoner and Mark Strand, and then followed Strand to the University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At Iowa she befriended fellow Northwest poet Tess Gallagher.
Jensen pairs domestic, stark imagery with complex metaphorical gesture, bridging interior and exterior spheres as she traces the shifting, halting, at times unfamiliar landscapes of memory and home. As poet Katie Peterson noted in a symposium on Jensen’s work in Pleiades, Jensen “calls new imaginative spaces into existence as an act of intellect and then registers them in the body of the poem with the full force of feeling.”
Jensen’s collections of poetry include Shelter (1985), Memory (1982), and Bad Boats (1977). Her work has been included in the anthologies In Tahoma’s Shadow: Poems from the City of Destiny (2009), Longman Contemporary Poetry (2nd ed.; 1989), and Northwest Variety: Personal Essays by Fourteen Regional Writers (1987).
In 1996 Jensen helped create the Distinguished Poet Series. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Washington State Arts Commission, and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund.

Reviews

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading Bad Boats is such a treat: Jensen's poems come from the Deep Image movement, and are chock full of near surreal images that keep us on our toes while simultaneously gliding over the deep water of emotional truth. Well crafted and like little else, it's a shame this book is out of print as I think young poets could learn a lot from it.

[Emma Bolden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book my freshman year of college, when my don suggested it. It's been my bedrock ever since. When I'm stuck or feeling I've lost myself and my writing, this is the book I turn to, and this is the book that somehow always turns me back.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Bad Boats pretty quickly and it was an enjoyable but not stellar collection of poems. The imagery was really compelling and the pieces were musical, but there was a little bit of connection missing from them--I had trouble finding what the emotional content (be it tone, mood, etc) or a scene was or isolating a narrative thread throughout the collection or most individual poems.

I am also unsure of the political valence of "Indian" which was a little disconcerting and potentially "problematic"--I'd be interested in other readers' thoughts on the piece.

I did especially like "The Red Dog", "Conversations in the Primate House", "The Ajax Samples", "The Only Dream", "Subject Matter", "Vespers", "Dreaming of Horses", "As the Window Darkens", "Water Widow", "All of them Who Ran from Rainclouds", and "Tomorrow in a Story". The poems in this collection were like dreams in their strangeness and their beauty as well as in their uninterpretability. They often didn't feel like they were intended to "mean," just as dreams happen according to their own logic, and not according to the logic of life or of signs. Here is some of "Tomorrow in a Story" as an example:

Needing more darkness, take the moon in hand.
Like an apple make it peel in one curl;
the constancy in the bright yellow wheat
where the moon's peel settles red like a bird
is golden among the cherries.

Crack the luna egg that does not taper.

Some other choice images: "They released the pigeons over Melrose Street. / The pigeons turned together in the afternoon / again and again / and their shadow was a blessing" (from "The Ajax Samples"); "In your favorite country, the one no one remembers yet, / the hen, the duck, the other ones that settle-- / all of them are minor deities" (from "Subject Matter"); "Have the trees and antennas seen this / blot for years, pumping like a gauge?" (from "The Window Darkens"); "House alleys are rutted and glorified / by wild grasses, wild plants, California poppies." (from "House is an Enigma"); "Someone with hair like a black squirrel / walks to a pedestal beneath a miniature carriage / and a door slams" (from "All of Them Who Ran from Rainclouds"; and "For all we know / there is a gray thief hiding on the roof, / spreading like weather on the shingles" (from "Night Typewriter Sounds")

Another intriguing entry in the catalog of American surreal and dreamed verse, although not my favorite book.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

quietly stunning well-crafted surreal poetic images

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

LAURA JENSEN IS MAGNIFICENT. This, right now, is probably my favorite book of poetry. A little less home-spun-feeling than her book Memory, a little more narrow and isolated. The title poem ends, "They are bad boats and they hate their anchors."

[P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of it was just not bad, or seemed too constructed and without real feeling coming through. But there were several very good things, and the author photo is great.

[Molly Brodak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still in my all-time top 5 favorite poetry books.

[Jacob]

"I am a soul without a body./I put on my shoes/and walk through the trees."