Spinning the Stone by Jana Bouma

Jana Bouma’s poetry is deceptive, seemingly chronicling the shared everyday, even the bucolic, lulling the reader into complacency—then flashing a mirror, disorienting, illuminating our bond to the chthonic.

–Yahya Fredrickson, author of In a Homeland Not Far: New & Selected Poems and The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali

There are things we remember, things we forget and, between them, a foggy no-man’s-land where Jana Bouma has settled in to recall what can be recalled. To call forth what can be called forth.

In Spinning the Stone, Bouma’s poetic finger is on a universal pulse, “an unknown gift a weight a dark and yawning/ courtyard a hero’s journey” and on a particular heart’s beating, “the moment the rooting mouth finds its place…”

This double vision occurs when a mature poet sees what is happening, and also what’s under what is happening. Whether you are “a teenage girl/ without a Kotex” or “a man/ who doesn’t remember his name” or “the mother of God/without a husband” Bouma will see you, and shine a light on you making you known. And remembered.

–Deborah Bogen, author of Speak Now This Charm, In Case of Sudden Free Fall, Let Me Open You a Swan and Landscape with Silos.