Jessie Janeshek’s Comments

I wrote these five poems in the heart of January anger and sadness or, as I phrase it in “Every Step’s Ceramic,” “in the winter of red treadmill discontent.” I had just returned from an amazing artist’s residency in sunny New Mexico to a rather iffy relationship in dark, woodsy West Virginia. These poems kept me company as, more or less snowed in, I alternated between currents of raw and numb.

I write differently depending on where I am geographically, but these poems lace together my New Mexico and West Virginia speakers since I drafted them while I was negotiating the border between these two places in my mind. I like that the ties that bind the voices here are ice-like, prone to shatter.

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