Jack Frost: Tales Across an Eastern Winter by Amanda Wochele

With this striking sequence of “eastern winter” poems, Amanda Wochele’s lines pick you up and drop you just as abruptly. Her spectral characters perch on barstools, stadium bleachers, and celestial bodies, asking for deliverance and grace. In language that is alternately taut and lithe, Wochele recasts the “Jack” characters of folklore and fable, from Jack and the Beanstalk to Jack Frost to the Jack of All Trades. Her arresting images of brutality and tenderness help to propel their narratives.

–Dr. James Davis, graduate deputy of Brooklyn College English department, and author of  Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (2015) and Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933 (2007).