With Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Star Trek as her muses, Jackie Craven subverts time in WHISH. Employing prose poems, a sonnet in block form, haibun, and lineated verse, she compresses and bends hours and decades and centuries into whizzing, neo-surreal gestures. Anesthesia, death, young love, and infidelity all are destabilized as the speaker looks forward and backwards, as clocks continue to look at the speaker and us. WHISH is a triumph of a book! Jackie Craven has a wholly original voice.

-DENISE DUHAMEL, author of Second Story

These experimental prose poems and hybrid pieces obsess about the ephemeral nature of time-a Kafkaesque portrait of existence-surreal and strange like Dali's melting clocks. Craven skillfully paints a manic world full of stark and haunting images with an existential echo, always dissecting and magnifying the mundane. If you love the surreal, the experimental, the philosophical, this book of prose poems is for you! Bravo, well done, poet!

-JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ, author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American

WHISH is a perfect title for these poems that crackle with energy and insight as they explore how time shapes our lives. Time isn't an abstraction here, or an arrow, the poems insist, and summon up the several worlds we live in at once-past, present, and future. Living and dead intermingle, people weave and revise the stories of their lives as if they had all the time in the world-even though the clock is ticking. These poems are brilliant: full of light, sharp and clear in tone. They illuminate what it is to be mortal.

-SHARON BRYAN, author of Sharp Stars