My Enemies - by Jane Gregory (Paperback)

About the Book

Poetry. Jane Gregory's MY ENEMIES records a poet's search for meaning in a landscape of combined and dissolving definitions. Affirming disaster and its beyond, these poems sing toward belief--a self-made belief that will not rely on any static symbol or logic or idol. Gregory's dynamic, unpredictable enactments of the modern world avow vulnerability to a belief compatible with self-consciousness. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes overcome or self-ruinous, MY ENEMIES never halts in its search for definition, even when it claims to not have been written--as in the serial "Book I Will Not Write" poems. Each poem here establishes a new, necessary material and mode for our uncertain world that can offer its readers something to believe in; despite forces internal and external that try to undo us, Gregory's poems redo that undoing until "my enemies" becomes instead "my eyes many," a new sonic way of seeing.

"When Jane Gregory speaks of 'enemies' she speaks of those elements that (following Valery) ravage books and people alike: fire, humidity, wild animals, time, and their own inner content. Gregory knows how to let those elementals run free in her own words, and to make a friend of their disequilibrating energy. Her work renews romanticism in the twilight of time, knowing that even the spelling of words is the spilling of everything they cannot say. Here, the poet has overwritten the multiples of her 'Book I Will Not Write' with 'the fire in the ocean'--with words that, reduced to their very atoms, 'in the dark: s,i,n,g.'"--Andrew Joron

"Jane Gregory's MY ENEMIES is a collection of high-stepping verses of live wires where every phrase is a detonation od swings, breaks and pops! Thrillers 'suitable for blasting' (viz. 'guncotton')--pages of startling figures, near rhymes and off rhymes, psychological, philosophical, ec

Book Synopsis

"A collection of high-stepping verses of live wires where every phrase is a detonation of swings, breaks and pops." --Norma Cole

Jane Gregory's My Enemies records a poet's search for meaning in a landscape of combined and dissolving definitions. Affirming disaster and its beyond, these poems sing toward belief--a self-made belief that will not rely on any static symbol or logic or idol. Gregory's dynamic, unpredictable enactments of the modern world avow vulnerability to a belief compatible with self-consciousness. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes overcome or self-ruinous, My Enemies never halts in its search for definition, even when it claims to not have been written--as in the serial "Book I Will Not Write" poems. Each poem here establishes a new, necessary material and mode for our uncertain world that can offer its readers something to believe in.
Jane Gregory is from Tucson and lives in Oakland. She is co-founder and co-editor of Nion Editions, a chapbook press.