A World in Which bookcover

A World in Which

J L Conrad 

(Author)
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world

Description

Allusive, mystical, and deeply felt, J.L. Conrad's A World in Which calls to mind Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Her lyricism is impeccable, her imagination radical. Open houses, carpool lines, married life, pet care, and election days barely conceal the dystopian of scarab infestations, environmental illness, mass surveillance, biblical floods, and meteor showers. Granted communion with their beloved dead, the living persevere despite the "approaching hoofbeats" of the Apocalypse. As these visionary poems avow, "It falls to us to shovel dirt over the flames."

-Carolyn Hembree, For Today

Product Details

PublisherTerrapin Books
Publish DateApril 04, 2024
Pages120
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781947896734
Dimensions9.0 X 6.0 X 0.3 inches | 0.4 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

About the Author

J. L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collection A Cartography of Birds (Louisiana State University Press), and the chapbooks Recovery, winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize (Texas Review Press), Not If But When, winner of the third annual Dead Lake Chapbook Competition (Salt Hill), and Species of Light, a limited-edition artist's book carried out in collaboration with printmaker Sarah Noble. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Jellyfish, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from American University and PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Ohio, she currently lives in Madison.

Reviews

J.L. Conrad's A World in Which opens with "a question of loss." Conrad's goal is not to answer that question, but to survey its shadows. These elegant, brooding lyrics are deeply rooted in the winter realities of a household, while an interwoven series of prose poems, "Miracle Town," exists on an alternate plane in which trees make their way through neighborhoods, "leaves flapping like tongues as they congregate in small packs before dispersing and slipping back into the long pockets they have left in the soil." This collection will resonate with anyone who has felt the precise weight of love and now, like a fruit readying to slip its skin, must confront the alchemies of heat and time.

-Sandra Beasley, Made to Explode


The arresting poems of J.L. Conrad mesmerize as they turn on dislocation and disjunction, the spaces in which we lose footing. Here the ordinary shifts, the daily set askew at unexpected angles. I felt the top of my head taken off in poem after poem as the poet worked her Dickinsonian magic. Zoo animals escape to run through the streets. People do not heal, but miraculously severed heads still sing. The world the poet inhabits rests on a foundation of potential doom, of hushed anxieties, yet "love keeps unfolding." And though "we make our way out not knowing the way back," a faith of sorts calls out to us, assuring us "what you have will not be everything / but will be enough." For this, we should give thanks.

-Todd Davis, Coffin Honey and Native Species

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.sign up to affiliate program link
Become an affiliate