A finalist for the Donald Justice Prize, Jennifer Reeser's third volume ranges from the light and amusing to the weighted and anguished. Twenty-seven of the poems in this collection present a tragicomic dialogue with William Shakespeare, through the persona of the Dark Lady addressed in his latter sonnets. Over seventy others present portraits-in-poetry of shops, performers and vendors in the famous French Quarter of New Orleans: candelabras, Carnival and cockroaches; the catastrophic events of the Louisiana hurricanes of 2005, and that state's ensuing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. By diverse styles and forms, from the ghazal and villanelle to sapphics to sonnets to the limerick, in blank verse and rhyme, in modes lyric, narrative and dramatic, the author communicates on love, faith, family, psychology, fashion, art and the forces of Nature; and not through her poems alone, but also through those of the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire, whose translations she offers in English form similar to those French versions in which they were first composed. This collection includes poems and translations previously published in such magazines and journals as The National Review, POETRY, LIGHT: A Quarterly of Light Verse, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, First Things, The Dark Horse, Unsplendid, Mezzo Cammin, American Arts Quarterly, Able Muse and MEASURE. It contains, as well, numerous nominees for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prize anthologies, with a foreword written by Australian editor, Paul Stevens, and with recommendations from National Review literary editor, Michael Potemra; Yale Scholar of the House in Poetry and author of Mortal Stakes / Faint Thunder, Timothy Murphy; and TRINACRIA editor, New York University professor, Dr. Joseph S. Salemi.
Jennifer Reeser has published two previous collections of poetry (including An Alabaster Flask, winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, 2003, which X. J. Kennedy, poet and former editor of The Paris Review, wrote "...ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.") Her honors include The New England Prize, The Lyric Memorial Prize, and awards from Dr. Alfred Dorn of The World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets. Her writing has been featured on the World Wide Web editions of POETRY, Verse Daily, Goodreads and E-verse Radio, and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Longman's college text, An Introduction to Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia and X. J. Kennedy. She has contributed poems, scholarly articles and translations of French and Russian literature to publications including POETRY, The Hudson Review, Light Quarterly, The Formalist, Mezzo Cammin, the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, First Things, and The National Review. Her verse and vocals have been set to music by classical/art song composer Lori Laitman, and the American recording artist, Briareus. She works as a consultant on the faculty of the West Chester Poetry Conference, the nation's largest annual conference on poetry. She is the former assistant editor to Iambs & Trochees, and lives amid the bayous of southern Louisiana with her husband and children.
