Dark Alphabet

 

Poems by Jennifer Maier

 

paper, 0-8093-2726-0, $14.95t
978-0-8093-2726-3
80 pages, 6x9
Poetry
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry — First Book Award
Jon Tribble, series editor

 

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Transporting readers far from the ordinary through everyday experiences

In works whose subjects range from the religious to the carnal, the whimsical to the foreboding, Jennifer Maier’s debut collection of poems, Dark Alphabet, explores the everyday mysteries of our common experience with humor, lucidity, and an unblinking yet compassionate eye. Whether occasioned by a song overheard on the car radio, a packet of risqué postcards from the 1920's, a conversation with a dead parent, or the behavior of ducks in mating season, each poem sets off on a journey that ranges far from its origins, arriving with the reader in a clearing at dusk, in a place of wise good humor and somber grace.

Waiting at the Neptune
H.K.H.
I see you in the lighted ticket window
like you'd been assembled in there,
a Spanish galleon in a bottle,
the eight months of me carved out
in front, like a wanton figurehead.
And I see the college kids
lining up
           down 45th, blue
under the neon trident. They
are about to graduate,
about to marry each other
and stop going to movies, but first,
each boy must slip this dollar
through the glass, and you,
spit out the tickets
like a purple tongue.
         Only then will they begin
moving like unwary swimmers
out of the blue April night into
the seascape lobby,
making their way blind,
down sloping aisles
to velvet-covered springs,
and waiting,
while the bob inside you,
for the curtain,
waiting, each of us,
for our sad or happy story.

 

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“Jennifer Maier's colloquial language settles you comfortably into the passenger seat for a journey full of surprising turns. The poems are triggered by ordinary events: a friend's asking why she doesn't write novels; the sight of ducks in mating season. Dark Alphabet is a sophisticated blend of wit, intellect, feeling and perception, as mysterious as nightfall and as fresh as daybreak.”—Madeline DeFrees, recipient of the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize for her selected poems, Blue Dusk

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The award-winning poet Jennifer Maier is an associate professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. She serves as an editor for the quarterly journal IMAGE. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, SWINK, The Mississippi Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.