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Jess

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Jess’s Bookshelves

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currently-reading‎ (123)

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poetry‎ (20)
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Jess is Currently Reading

Jess is currently reading

The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Jun 16, 2026 06:28AM

Jess is currently reading

Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner (Goodreads Author)

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May 29, 2026 07:26PM

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Wrong Place Wrong Time

by Gillian McAllister (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 26, 2026 06:19PM

See all 123 books that Jess is reading…

Jess’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems by Alice Walker

1 highlight

I am the woman offering two flowers whose roots are twin Justice and Hope Let us begin.

salt.

by Nayyirah Waheed

14 highlights
soft magic.

by Upile Chisala

1 highlight

See Jess’s 7 books with notes and highlights…

Jess’s Quotes

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

tags: attributed-no-source, friends, friendship, misattributed-albert-camus

93869 likes

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
― Mark Twain

tags: illusions, life

4042 likes

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism

46663 likes

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

tags: goals, success

3886 likes

“My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad

75 likes

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Jess’s Groups

¡ POETRY ! — 22518 members — last activity Jun 24, 2026 01:55PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more