SISI AND THE GIRL FROM TOWN by Jessica Jewell

In Jessica Jewell’s Sisi and the Girl from Town, human and natural histories emerge in brilliant shades from the landscape of Hungary. Jewell blends an intricate narrative of the life Elisabeth of Bavaria, “Sisi,” into a countryside once ravaged by war, where “A Tin Heron nests on the gunpowder ruins /above the cellars someone carved into the hills, / half a century ago / to protect the wine from the bombs.” Jewell’s command of language and observation is masterful. She wends her way through gorgeous images of a land governed by the sun toward startling reflections on time and human effect: “Far from here, / in the cities, all the thinking / is about domestication.”

–Christine Gosnay, author of Even Years and The Wanderer

You can hear the subtle speech of landscapes and an undercurrent of threat rivering through these pages. This quiet, shattered rendering of a complicated empress caught in edges is a study in understatement. “Had happiness worked” we wouldn’t be reading these striking poems, like lightning-scattered swan feathers on the waters of Lake Geneva. Jewell’s book elicits grace.

–Leah Poole Osowski, author of Hover Over Her