Money Money Money Water Water Water - by Jane Mead (Paperback)

About the Book

Money Money Money Water Water Water is a poignant lyrical inquiry into crucial environmental questions of our time.

Book Synopsis

A striking combination of the spiritual and political, Money Money Money Water Water Water explores the enormous impact that widespread environmental destruction makes on our way of life. With prophetic disquietude, Jane Mead's inquiry into the interconnectedness of our choices exposes our existence as paradox. Her poems beseech us to consider the consequences of our collective actions on the planet.

Review Quotes

"Despite its concern with the environment, the most fundamental and interesting preoccupation of Money Money Money Water Water Water may be with the kind of darkness that grows not from the outside but from within."
--West Branch

"[In Money Money Money Water Water Water] Jane Mead's assured hand has snipped exquisite holes in her poems, allowing the unsaid to rise, waver and haunt every line. . . [Mead] has removed every non-essential word, a mastery of distillation, to create a work of pure potency."
--The Conium Review

"I have not read, in a long time, a book of poems so unswervingly eloquent, so filled with sorrow and beauty, so powerfully connected to nature and advocacy for a dying earth as Jane Mead's new collection [Money Money Money Water Water Water]."
--The Los Angeles Times

"Jane Mead's mission is to rescue--to search and rescue; and the mind, above all, does the work. She says--twice--in one poem that "the mind gives over its small grave of secrets." She is searching for the "sentence written in stone--far enough back so the water can't get it." Her poems are a beautiful search for liberation and rebirth. I praise them to the sky."
--Gerald Stern

"Money Money Money Water Water Water offers us both a voice and an undervoice, and the tension between them achieves a loose-limbed elegance--whatever once had to be built can now be simply uttered, trusting the words to be as eternal--or more so--than the world we pass through. I feel utterly transported in Mead's presence, surrounded by--and imbued in--her language."
--Nick Flynn

"Money Money Money Water Water Water addresses not only the economic politics of water, but also the economic politics of investing in your own life. It's costly, and this book counts the ways. It's a book of ecopoetics in an unusually large sense--and one that contributes complexly to the genre's commitment to the political--but it also marks a structural advance in lyric poetry. Sound here is always foregrounded, put completely at the service of a highly poised and highly intentional play of aphoristic, almost ephemeral, passages against grounded, yet open-ended, poems that build into a life--both that of a person and that of a people. It's a beautiful, seamless book that never stops gathering force--one in which the strength, brilliance, and movement of the phrase is the ultimate ecosystem."
--Cole Swensen

"A tough, wise, and beautiful book about the human destruction of the earth and everything trying to live here: 'the poisoned planet poisoning.' All this brilliant poet's knowledge and experience have been gathered into this fierce, grieving book, laid at the feet of our global kingdom and power: 'How much can you subtract now / How much and still get by'."
--Jean Valentine

About the Author

Jane Mead is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently The Usable Field, also from Alice James Books. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals and she is the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now farms in northern California and teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.