$14.49
Mara Jebsen‘s chapbook is a child’s abecedarium with a flash of Lear and a touch of history and bursts of exuberance amid Dadaist play. Image and sound are lovingly and gleefully arranged in whimsical visual fields. And behind it all a single, powerful, bewildered heart is singing. I love a collection that starts with Ardor.
–Pat Rosal, author of Brooklyn Antediluvian
Harnessing the abecedarian form to visit language’s hidden signs, ghosts, traces, and remains, the poems in Mara Jebsen‘s Alphabet brave deep political and philosophical questions even as they offer dazzling improvisations. Like Harryette Mullen, Jebsen knows that voracious word-play, when coupled with a masterful grasp of form, can uncover not only our etymological motives but also our deepest yearnings. “[X], unknown, unknowable/ unknowable cross; god’s mark,” she writes near the end of her alphabetical journey, always urging her readers to see how linguistic associations “meet” and “cross” the spiritual. From ardor to zebra, she shows us persuasively and fearlessly why “these rare things/ bring us to marvel.”
–Michael Tyrell, author of The Wanted
Alphabet
by Mara Jebsen
$14.49, paper
Mara Jebsen is a poet, essayist and performer raised in Philadelphia and in Lome, Togo. She holds a B.A. in African and African American Studies from Duke University and an MFA from New York University. A 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, Mara currently teaches undergraduate writing at the Expository Writing Program and the Tisch school of Arts and Public Policy at New York University. Alphabet is her first chapbook.
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