Whores are Always Melancholy by Jess Mize

In her first chapbook, Jess explores some dark themes, like depression, death, and loss—the collection begins in a cemetery of sorts and ends in a cemetery; but in an irony that maybe only a poet can understand, there is a sense of hope and healing. With lines like, My sadness comes in waves. It is almost soothing … and You cannot be this miserable forever … the reader comes away shattered, and at the same time, renewed.

–R.L. Black. EIC of UnbrokenJournal

Jess Mize’s Whores Are Always Melancholy is at once a dynamic, jazz-infused jaunt down self-deprecation lane and a profoundly colorful tribute to the natural world. Mize integrates arresting imagery with bold insight and a cynical tone as she dissects human emotion, including the daggers of depression. Mize’s mind brings readers lines that they will hold close like keepsakes: “I have avoided solitude through fairy tales and like the sky today I have wept profusely when the bitter sun shines” (“Storm”) and “To satisfy your desires you need an annotated trucker’s atlas and a serious deficiency of remorse” (“Scot Fuckin’ Free”) are among these. Mize’s humor and playful diction allow light into even the darkest musings, and, although macabre at times, this collection offers an overall message of hope and solidarity; she writes of the afterlife, “Eternal damnation will smell / like gardenias” (“Sound of Death”). From meditating on historical figures such as Joan of Arc to giving nods to popular culture through artists like Rihanna, Mize incorporates all walks of life—and death—to celebrate the eternal effects of love and the power that comes from self-acceptance, even if one only truly feels alive on the Day of the Dead.

–Sarah A. O’Brien, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Boston Accent Lit

A critic once wrote of Steely Dan’s lyrics that they entwined a fascinating combination of hyper-specific details and strangely inaccessible abstractions.  Listening, one might feel simultaneously grounded and baffled—a very acute and concrete sense of dreamlike wonderment.  Poet Jess Mize concocts the same lyric alchemy in Whores Are Always Melancholy.  Alternating between smooth ephemeral grooves and pointed riffs of hard-edged images, her music creates worldscapes that feel at once familiar and strange and populates them with characters we’ve never met but perhaps have always known.  A delightfully well-constructed improvisation, by turns whimsical and dark, Mize marries the wry and the sincere, the mundane and the exotic, the profane and the sacred—and makes them dance.

–Christopher T. Wilkerson, M.F.A. in English/Creative Writing, author of Storm and Covenant