After Image - by Jenny George (Paperback)

About the Book

"A collection of poems by Jenny George"--

Book Synopsis

Woven from dreamlike and echoing images, After Image travels between life and death, between a living body and its absence.

A house, an orchard, "a shudder of blossoms." A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George's After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. "And in the space / left behind-" Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet's persona appears as its own character--the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief's terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George's sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.

Review Quotes

Praise for After Image

"The liminal space between life and death provides the geography for George's new collection, After Image, in which the real-life death of her long-term partner vivifies the everyday landscape with beauty, grief and yearning."-Julia Goldberg, Santa Fe Reporter

"After Image by Jenny George is intense and controlled and delicate, a study of character and narrative. There are mythological Greek characters presented minus the heroism, deaths that rebirth in language, and repetition of these worlds: 'The story ends / with a wedding. Then everyone endures.' Such strong lines make familiar images feel estranged and big statements about 'the world' feel wholly true. In this evocative collection, the self willingly recedes and the bees, in hope, abound."--Poetry Northwest

"Splendid, subtle, nuanced, but ultimately punch-packed. . . . Her temperament is different from that of [someone like Robert] Lowell, more formal, quieter, often on the down-low, yet the sting is equally deep and lasting."--Johnny Payne, Merion West

"George (Asterisk) examines in her stunning third collection the space left by the death of a loved one--not an emptiness, but a collection of artifacts and memories, a world that suddenly takes on new meaning. . . . This is a monumental work on death and grieving in a deceptively slim package."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

"As serene as After Image might seem, it is also a book about contrasts and clashes. One major clash lies between being in the world, which in this book is dominated by a hauntingly spare wilderness in which activities like mourning (in this case, for a loved one) lie alongside reinvention of existence as near-magical. The book's leaps in this direction are entrancing but also scary. . . . What makes the book such an achievement: the demonstration of our ability to move past grief, at the point when it has merged with the everyday and worked to transform it for however long a time--and then to look at the new self standing on the other side of that experience without fear."--Max Winter, Rhino Poetry

"The relevance of After Image, Jenny George's latest, lies in its quiet, then surprising disjunction as a familiar word twitches into unfamiliar grammar. Her language, a kind of sustained negation, develops with ghostly slowness, as though each boxy stanza were stared at a while. . . . Keeping these poems from dissipating into wispy impressionism is the honesty of George's process."--Erick Verran, Cleveland Review of Books

Praise for Jenny George

"Shimmering, mystical, and incisive . . . reaches into the ether of the human experience and illuminates the irrational nature of emotions. . . . George's jewel of a collection acts as both a catalyst and antidote for philosophical ruminations."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Reminds us of the liminal nature of existence; the poems exist on a threshold between states of being and move quietly between worlds. . . . The power of The Dream of Reason is revelation through image, and yet these images radiate with feeling. George has given us a brilliant debut."--Tupelo Quarterly

"George is an expert tour guide of cruelty through a lens of tenderness and humanity, bringing us to the thresholds of what we can possibly endure, making the thresholds glimmer with morning sun, reaching towards 'happiness with its horizon of pain.'"--The Rumpus

"Jenny George's The Dream of Reason is nature poetry as phantasm, paradox, evocation, assembly line, and hard-earned beauty. These poems collide the sublime with

Praise for After Image

"The liminal space between life and death provides the geography for George's new collection, After Image, in which the real-life death of her long-term partner vivifies the everyday landscape with beauty, grief and yearning."--Julia Goldberg, Santa Fe Reporter

"After Image by Jenny George is intense and controlled and delicate, a study of character and narrative. There are mythological Greek characters presented minus the heroism, deaths that rebirth in language, and repetition of these worlds: 'The story ends / with a wedding. Then everyone endures.' Such strong lines make familiar images feel estranged and big statements about 'the world' feel wholly true. In this evocative collection, the self willingly recedes and the bees, in hope, abound."--Poetry Northwest

"Splendid, subtle, nuanced, but ultimately punch-packed. . . . Her temperament is different from that of [someone like Robert] Lowell, more formal, quieter, often on the down-low, yet the sting is equally deep and lasting."--Johnny Payne, Merion West

"George (Asterisk) examines in her stunning third collection the space left by the death of a loved one--not an emptiness, but a collection of artifacts and memories, a world that suddenly takes on new meaning. . . . This is a monumental work on death and grieving in a deceptively slim package."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

"As serene as After Image might seem, it is also a book about contrasts and clashes. One major clash lies between being in the world, which in this book is dominated by a hauntingly spare wilderness in which activities like mourning (in this case, for a loved one) lie alongside reinvention of existence as near-magical. The book's leaps in this direction are entrancing but also scary. . . . What makes the book such an achievement: the demonstration of our ability to move past grief, at the point when it has merged with the everyday and worked to transform it for however long a time--and then to look at the new self standing on the other side of that experience without fear."--Max Winter, Rhino Poetry

"The relevance of After Image, Jenny George's latest, lies in its quiet, then surprising disjunction as a familiar word twitches into unfamiliar grammar. Her language, a kind of sustained negation, develops with ghostly slowness, as though each boxy stanza were stared at a while. . . . Keeping these poems from dissipating into wispy impressionism is the honesty of George's process."--Erick Verran, Cleveland Review of Books

Praise for Jenny George

"Shimmering, mystical, and incisive . . . reaches into the ether of the human experience and illuminates the irrational nature of emotions. . . . George's jewel of a collection acts as both a catalyst and antidote for philosophical ruminations."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Reminds us of the liminal nature of existence; the poems exist on a threshold between states of being and move quietly between worlds. . . . The power of The Dream of Reason is revelation through image, and yet these images radiate with feeling. George has given us a brilliant debut."--Tupelo Quarterly

"George is an expert tour guide of cruelty through a lens of tenderness and humanity, bringing us to the thresholds of what we can possibly endure, making the thresholds glimmer with morning sun, reaching towards 'happiness with its horizon of pain.'"--The Rumpus

"Jenny George's The Dream of Reason is nature poetry as phantasm, paradox, evocation, assembly line, and hard-earned beauty. These poems collide the sublime with the earthly, the farm with the netherworld."--Orion Magazine

"George's clear, uncanny poems are haunting, in both their action and their make-up. . . . [She] subtly unravels the very reason and artifice embedded in the making of a poem; she dismantles and proves the instability of a poem's supposed logics and truths without a loss of lyric or emotional force. This gentle taking apart of structure, meaning the poems become both familiar and unfamiliar to us, alongside the poems' strangeness and dark surrealism--trains fall through fields, the brain is a 'murderous bulb'--all induce the skin-pricking feeling of the crooked and uncanny."--White Review

"George refuses to sensationalize or capitalize her private feelings; she eschews, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, the temptation to make a career of her pain. Perhaps for this reason, the suffering in the poems is all the more exquisitely felt. . . . The voicings of these poems are an attempt to conjure and reconstitute the beloved lost body and all that went with it. It is an act of after image, of bodying forth an absence through imagined 'things' and keening song."--Lisa Russ Spaar, Adroit Journal

"When entering Jenny George's third collection, you'll feel as though you've stepped into a still-life. . . . After Image is surreal, unnerving, and filled with longing."--Turi Sioson, Only Poems

"The poems are striking for their immediacy and apparent simplicity. . . . A spectacular book."--David Starkey, California Review of Books

About the Author

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.