Spilled and Gone - University of Pittsburgh Press

Spilled and Gone

Poems

In Spilled and Gone, her new collection of poems, Jessica Greenbaum envisions a Brooklyn that is real and a Brooklyn that is everywhere. She achieves this by a brilliant use of metaphor: her seagulls ‘wheel like immigrating thoughts,’ and a half-moon at dawn is ‘stuck like a dime in the coin slot.’ So, too, her exuberant odes to a potato masher and a stovetop espresso maker raise those mundane objects until they rise off the page, Whatever she entertains -- a storm-struck tree, an outdoor concert, her immigrant grandparents, a food truck in Grand Army Plaza -- her subject is enlivened by keen observation, a fresh mind, and a vivid sense of place that makes me want to be there, with her, in her world.

Grace Schulman

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum’s third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as “the ocean on a shiny day,” and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson’s herbarium “might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists.”
At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation’s associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of “the good against the violence” the speaker asks, “why can’t the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can’t the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?” A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum “spills” details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.

More Praise

Jessica's Greenbaum's poetry has the joie de vivre of New York School poetics, tempered by the griefs and reflectiveness of an experientially tested soul. Confident in craft, substantial of heart, Spilled and Gone is the dexterous voice of a poet calling out to her earthly company of people and things, claiming and praising them. When I read it, I feel myself open and relax into the world.

Tony Hoagland

In her stunning new collection Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum transcends the limits of ordinary experiences, making of them indelible moments of human boundedness. We feel ourselves breaking in each heartrending line here, as houses crash down next door and lupines are all we have left – and when it seems our very souls might leak away, we are ultimately repaired by the poet's abiding faith in life and love, like ‘the trees/themselves, how we depend on them to keep standing around us.’ Such is the astonishing healing power of Greenbaum's poetry, to admit freely our impermanence, and yet always to restore us.

Rafael Campo

Table of Contents

Sample

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

April, 2019

isbn : 9780822965725

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / General

about the author

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of Inventing Difficulty, winner of the Gerald Cable Prize, and The Two Yvonnes, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the NEA, and of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America for the poems in Spilled and Gone. She teaches inside and outside academia, and lives in her native Brooklyn.

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