Species by Jessica Conley

Can a tune be translated into words? With a musician’s timing and control, Jessica Conley sets off on this imaginative task. Her multiple melodies – evocations of Stephane Wrembel’s jazz guitar braided with meditative “anti-elegies” and lyrical passages that clear intricate spaces for themselves – are composed with care and grow more thrilling the more deeply you listen. Species has the strange and wondrous ability to cancel noise. Each note just so. It’s going straight to my playlist.

–Karen Donovan, author of Monad+Monadnock

Entering Jessica Conley’s Species offers a keen experience of synesthesia—where musical tones can produce sensations of color and texture—as she expertly blends the moods, songs, and sounds of everyday living into a poetry energized by often soul-searching and sometimes violent encounters with the natural world, where “death is expected, though it happens more some days than others.” Conley’s poems incorporate all the tensions, complexities, and discoveries of a self in relation to a changing world, aware of an ominous future yet finding hope and solace that “there is already so much music.”

–Michele Poulos, author of Black Laurel

Conley bridges the gap between music and words, drawing inspiration from the titles I gave to the different musical parts of my album Terre des Hommes. Through these titles and musical ambiance, she uses my music as a score for her own inner creative and imaginative landscape, giving the tunes new meaning. The journey continues.

–Stephane Wrembel, award-winning jazz guitarist and composer

The reflected independence of mind and subtle strength of character that rises like a mist from these poems enacts a respect for the reader’s intelligence that allows us the same intensities of attention and surrender that the poems embody. Here is a poet who knows how poetry “enters the body,” as well as “how to write silence” and its counterpoint, creating a procession of discoveries in a poetry of precision, elegance, and vision.

–Gregory Donovan, Blackbird Founding Editor and author of Torn from the Sun