Description
Love orange light warm
by Jaclyn Alexander
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-521-6
2018
Jaclyn Alexander is a native New Yorker, and after a four-year stint in the Mid-West at Washington University in St. Louis, she returned to her home state. She completed her MFA at The New School, where she was selected to be the research assistant to the head of the program. Her poems, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in BOMB, Vestal Review, Haribo, and Prelude, and are forthcoming in Bowery’s Anthology. Jaclyn has been teaching writing to kids for the past five years, and she started her own ceramic business on the side: jaclynalexander.com . She has worked as a teaching artist at Voices Unbroken, an organization that puts writers into foster care centers and prisons in NY, and she volunteers as a Prison Writing Mentor with Pen American Center. This is her first published chapbook.
connie mae –
“Love orange light warm” introduces us to a prescient landscape of modern heartache rooted in antiquity. Jaclyn Alexander unfolds a thoughtful tapestry of narratives that are fleetingly encountered; tension rises to the surface, as in “I-phone notes, 12:11 PM” after which a figure recedes “back into rooms of warm orange light.” Alexander invokes the voices of Lyn Hejinian and H.D., and in doing so expands upon their characteristic lucidity. There is a positing and revision of definitions of love, via an inquisitive consciousness capable of painting an entire morning full of greenery. The intermittent preparation and consumption of food stands alongside a greater nourishment that the reader finds herself longing for, before a final kettle song pulls Alexander’s dreamscape back to the beginning; love as speculative language.