ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Jennifer Givhan, a National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellow, is a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of four full-length collections: Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series edited by Billy Collins), Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize chosen by Ross Gay), and Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series, forthcoming 2019), and the chapbooks: Lifeline (Glass Poetry Press) and The Daughter’s Curse (Yellow Flag Press). Her novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee, are forthcoming from Blackstone Press. Her honors include the Frost Place Latinx Scholarship, a National Latinx Writers’ Conference Scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize chosen by Monica Youn, the Pinch Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Limón, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize 2nd place chosen by Patricia Spears Jones, and ten Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review, among many others. Givhan holds a Master’s degree in English from California State University Fullerton and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and she can be found discussing feminist motherhood on her website and social media.
Also by Jennifer Givhan:
Protection Spell
Landscape with Headless Mama
Protection Spell
Rosa’s Einstein
Lifeline
The Daughter’s Curse
Nightfishing
I’m in love with a man who believes in healing
I’m in love with a man who doesn’t understand
why I slice with only one sharp spine of the sword
when in his body he knows its every jagged flank
I’m in love with a man who reminds me
how brave I am How mostly the world
fills with geese in a field glistening with sunrise
after a cold river of nightfishing
I won’t let my children eat melon
without washing the skin
because once a farm infected
with listeria killed several people
I’ve always argued love is the balm
Now I see love was also the wound
In the dark, cold water you need to know what you're feeling for — or trust that you'll know it once you feel it. Even when the man was all wrong for me, healing can come from recognizing the true source of the pain. Sometimes it also helps to listen to REM on repeat ("Nightswimming" influenced this one). And I am trying to trust the fruit platter. We are here this once--and we must let our foolish hearts love what they love. Even unwashed melon. Even that.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
