The Surface of Last Scattering (The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize)
by Gray Jacobik
Category: Poetry

In the opening poem of The Surface of last Scattering, the poet asks "How shape a full-bodied intelligent speaking for an open-hearted listening?" In pursuit of the possibilities engendered by this question, Gray Jacobik writes meditative lyrics, essay-poems and prose-poems as grounded in the mind as in the body, poems that assume, and reward, an open-hearted listening. Ascribing to no one school of poetics, and no one style, Jacobik is unafraid of either spare language or a language of high color. She uses a range of resources from verisimilitude to abstraction to write poems that are at once instruments of knowing and passionate songs. Emily I spent my birthday with a woman who might have been myself, thirty years ago, myself without the early tragedies. Her thirst for experience, her talent for using it, I know as clearly as, after a long day, I know the small of my back. Her sweetness is the sweetness that once held me.