The Thicket: Poems

"The Thicket examines the complexities of our humanity, using nature as a tethering force. From the collection's title, readers are introduced to the idea of "the thicket"--a word that resurfaces again and again. Jueds' poems search through the metaphorical thickets--of loss, of time passing, of grief--with the understanding that, no matter what, we will break through the dense brush and reach the other side." --West Review
"In Kasey Jueds's gorgeous new book, The Thicket, every flower, thorn, and body of water is both archetype and fact. These rich lyrics act as doors to a transformation like sleep or like season. Jueds's poems are like living inside a spell, a magic that is both story and circle. With her close attention to nature and stunning litanies, she enchants the natural world around us and reminds us that through all of our painful changes, 'how long it takes to become human again.' Read this book and let yourself be spellbound." --Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
"The reader is led gently, generously, into The Thicket as if by hand, branches parted to show what only Kasey Jueds knows--the stories of trees, the language of the wind, and the hush of secret places long undisturbed. In these poems, Jueds attends to the natural world, reveals in rich lyricism its cadences and questions. In a chaotic, distracted world, these poems insist we pause, look, and look again." --Leila Chatti, author of Tunsiya/Amrikiya
"Long after finishing The Thicket, I felt rocked inside its motion, a music made of wind and river current, blood, breath and wingbeat. In poem after poem Jueds leads us across the natural world, turned fabular by lavishly lyric detail, to passages unseen, through which deer spotted one moment vanish the next. The Thicket is a true beauty of a book, fully awake to the many spells of our existence." --Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore
"Entering The Thicket it's as if I walk into another world, one where things are more vivid and alive. Like the land of fables and fairy tales, the Technicolor wonder along the yellow brick road." --Orion

"These incisive and ruminating poems compel readers to look past the distractions of modern life, placing them among weed-ridden roadsides, in flowing rivers, and in the rustling of trees. Through these images, Jueds interrogates what it means to exist, to change, and to search for connection." --Read Poetry

"What expands inside Jueds's new book is an irreducible reality--a sense that makes memory flicker, a knowing that underscores the distance between a word and what it calls or recalls. The Thicket swells with feelings too pure to name. It swells with what it cannot explicate, with what it cannot contain in the vessel of its exquisite phrases. And, to be clear, that is not remotely a failure. It is gorgeous." --Plume Poetry

"Kasey Jueds's second collection, The Thicket, has intersecting emotional and imagistic arcs that reward the careful reader with complex realizations that refuse closure. Two questions are skeleton keys that allow the speaker--and the reader--to unlock metaphorical gates of self-awareness: 'Where am I?' and 'Where does one thing become another?'" --Colorado Review