From the Fever-World

Here is language given to an unrecorded life, a fiery spirit released through utterance of the most intimate feelings of an imagined Old World woman, one confined to a body used and defined by others. In an act of historical reclamation and generosity, Jehanne Dubrow breaks the ancestral silence of female subjectivity radically constrained by tradition; the result is a poetry of an almost incandescent intensity, a kind of fever dream in a world forever winter. - Eleanor Wilner These are feverish poems indeed, ardent to the point of hallucination, burning between the sexuality of the sacred and the need to write: "to find the slingshot word...turning/ pencils into nettle-points," and to be the writing, incantatory as a curse, ancient as the lost world of Yiddish Poland, modern or timeless as "the fullness that begins with emptiness," the "bitterness that sticks/ like honey on the tongue." Dubrow's poetry is never less than astonishing. - Alicia Ostriker In these precise and soulful meditations, Dubrow combs through lost, illuminated fields of lyrical imagery for what's been "left for gleaners to find," and in doing so, restores some part of what we cannot live without. - Dorianne Laux BIO: Jehanne Dubrow's work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Hardship Post, and a chapbook, The Promised Bride. Her third book, Stateside, will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2010. She is an assistant professor in creative writing and literature at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.