| | Event: | Jennes Book Launch, Ridgefield | | Date: | May 7th, 2024.
| | Time: | 7:00 PM | | Location: | Ridgefield Library | | Contact: | barbjennes@gmail.com | | Website: | reserve at bit.ly/3Q46YUo | |  | |
FLOWN is an elegy-in-verse for Jennes's late sister Harriet, the oldest of three girls. The poems weave between portentous childhood memories and the inexorable progress of the disease that would ultimately take her life. It is as much a celebration of the powerful role Harriet played in Jennes's life as a lamentation for her loss. Here's what two reviewers had to say:
FLOWN by B. Jennes is a stunning testament to how a traditional elegy can be rendered tender & unsentimental, vast & precise—a vanishing point on the horizon.
"In these transformative poems of mourning, written in the aftermath of her sister’s death, Jennes demonstrates the power of world-making by inviting readers into the literal & metaphorical “holes,” the limitless, liminal spaces of grief, while writing into the coexistence of past & present, dead & living, grief & remembrance. About the moments before death, she writes: Even as they unfolded, / those moments were becoming / the space where the bird flew, the place where our fear turned / to laughter turned to wind turned / to silence turned us to meteors. Where does our grief begin & end? With what do we fill the spaces left by the dead? And how do we—how can we—let absence fill them?
~Joan Kwon Glass, Author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024) & Night Swim (Diode, 2022)
From a bird sweeping the “space above us” in its opening poem, to the collection’s final line (and exquisitely chosen title), birds of all kinds animate the delicate, spare poems in B. Fulton Jennes’ FLOWN. With variations on My Dead Sister, My Dying Sister, Dies, or Death resounding in nearly every title,
Jennes delivers her unwavering, clear-eyed poems with a heartache made all the more unbearable by their simplicity. Weaving between the heart-rending specificity of childhood memories and the inexorable progress that unfolds from the first ominous MRI to the end of her sister’s life, Jennes’s revelatory poems capture the mystery of both a life and its loss. Like the song of “A Mockingbird (that) Sings as My Sister Dies,” these poems fill the “night, summoning a life,” then “begin again—testing a new song/far away.”
~ Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Author of One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019) and Maumee, Maumee (Alice Green & Co., 2022)
Jennes will also be reading at:
* Byrd's Books (178 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel, CT) on Friday, May 10, 7:00
* Briarcliff Manor Public Library (1 Library Rd. Briarcliff Manor, NY - 2nd floor) on Saturday, April 27, 3:00
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