Masked/Unmuted by Jean Hackett

Reading Masked/ Unmasked by Jean Hackett is to experience the world as a poet living moment to moment, in today’s chaotic political/pandemic world.  With a naturalist’s sensibility; she captures the interplay of daily coping and a larger concern for the planet.   A singular eye that can speak to water still spins down the drain clockwise and leap to a car hood, pollen and backyard mockingbirds in a single poem.  In this collection, nature is a character involving itself in a lover’s breakup and white privilege.  Masked/Unmasked deliberates the continual adaptation to circumstance.  She describes COVID as: the plague smiled and waited to present itself in new clothes.  Life on Zoom is described as: we’ve memorized the décor of our shared spaces.  The poet’s masterful use of alliteration brings an unexpected music to this work.  A must read for readers looking for fresh and brilliant language and a deeper redemption.  And as so aptly stated by the poet, Big decisions must fall to higher powers.  Jesus take the bulldozer wheel!

–Lisha Adela García, author of Blood Rivers and A Rope of Luna

It is a pleasure to read Jean Hackett‘s collection of poems, Masked: Unmuted. The rhythm and flow of language whispers and sometimes shouts the reader through waxing and waning demands of life during a pandemic. The poetry honors loss and life, sacred and mundane, fear and hope. It connects us to our relationships to the small world of our confinement, with the magnitude of the global, the universal, to one another, and to our own hearts. Each poem compels the reader to grasp the next. The poems are evocative, thoughtful, with touches of humor that bring a smile and with emotion that shapes a tear. Mary Oliver writes in A Poetry Handbook, “…A poem…is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.” I applaud the “love affair” of this poetry.

–Dr. Patricia Keoughan, Ocotillo Review, Enigmatist, Di-verse-city, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Through Layered Limestone.