Description
Book SynopsisFinalist, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster Award
In tarot, the Fool represents continual beginnings, not being able to see or think past the excitement and potential of a new start. The Fool is also associated with zero — a literal loop.
Like Anne Carson writing poetry in the style of the poet alchemist Arthur Rimbaud, Jessie Jones renders her reflections with acerbic brilliance. In her debut collection, she examines the sensual, cruel, pleasing, and depraved state of being human in the twenty-first century. All pro, she’s ready to stage a coup d’état.
Reflective with a kind of circular logic edging toward a darker surrealism, these poems are at times comically satirical, but always grounded in fresh ethos. A pleasure of language and circumstance, where passengers on a boat peer through "a thick, absorbent mist" and the poet moves "through/the city like a bundle of kindling./ All day I wait for a bit of friction/ to transform me," The Fool sets its sights on a world riddled with panaceas designed to course-correct our lives.
Trade Review"
The Fool is electric proof that the fear of not becoming is the only useful fear. The speaker of these poems introduces us to unforgettable places where 'sound has the skin of an apricot' where 'the half-life of [...] ardour is a thousand inner deaths.' In
The Fool, to be human is to be ever-emerging. The speaker here makes resolutions only to find each piece of herself is Hydra, is Medusa's hair, a tentacular force propelling her in a million possible directions. With Jones, we learn that arrival is not the conclusion of desire but an extension of it. I'll go under any spell she casts." -- Sarah Burgoyne, author of
Saint Twin"Like watching a hitherto unknown surrealist film through shivering Venetian blinds, to read
The Fool is to be invited to consider the unfixed apertures and shapes of images and words. The botanical, kaleidoscopic language of this stunning and strange debut drew me into its depths, where I found a continuous refusal of the female body, mind, and psyche to be sayable or knowable, i.e. 'kept.'" -- Emily Skillings, author of
Fort Not
