About this item
Highlights
- Jane Mead's fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death.
- About the Author: Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently MONEY MONEY MONEY / WATER WATER WATER (Alice James, 2014).
- 100 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
Heartfelt poems from a daughter's perspective as she cares for her elderly mother in her final weeks of life.Book Synopsis
Jane Mead's fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We're drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.
Review Quotes
". . . Mead's earthiness sometimes morphs into otherworldliness."
--Publishers Weekly
"In her fifth book [World of Made and Unmade]. . . Mead performs a sustained feat of imagination. We are given details of a harrowing present, as 'the patient's' selfhood dissipates, yet still renavigates the past and peers into an unforgiving future."
--The Los Angeles Times
Mead propels readers forward, using plain language that's elegant in its simplicity yet compelling and heartbreaking. Even as she confronts grief and loss, the poet highlights the overriding theme of courage."
--Library Journal
"World of Made and Unmade is a deep blue yarn of very fine thread. We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead's poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacán waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up."
--C.D. Wright
"In love and in dying, Zeno's paradox proves to be neither paradoxical nor absurd. Rather, it vivifies each point of time into a sword-point, a needle point, a keen glint on a hillside, piercing eternity. In Jane Mead's World of Made and Unmade, we find distances we'd never expected in the gilded lapse of time. And Mead sets these distances into motion, into a cinema of true feeling and insuperable dignity. Life is unassailable in death, and Jane Mead proves it so."
--Donald Revell
About the Author
Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently MONEY MONEY MONEY / WATER WATER WATER (Alice James, 2014). Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she's the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. She teaches at the low residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.