The Declarable Future (Four Lakes Prize in Poetry)
"I can't remember a recent book so inhabited by a spirit of unease about where we find ourselves now. 'Always in search of the voices,' she writes, and I can feel Jennifer Boyden probing for a way to give shape, less to a catalog of our social and spiritual predicaments than the mood of our times. This is a wise book by a talented poet."—Bob Hicok, author ofThe Legend of Light"From the crystal doorknob transmitters that openThe Declarable Futureto the last will of the lost man that closes it, I was utterly captivated by the power of Jennifer Boyden's parallel world—a timely, disquieting parable for the broken one in which we live. Her lost man, like Z. Herbert's Mr. Cogito, becomes an alter ego who inhabits and interprets our current predicament. Her colloquial language is lucid, metaphorically inventive, constantly surprising—a rare blend of the piquant and the quietly tragic."—Eleanor Wilner, Warren Wilson College"Here recent scientific breakthroughs collide with intimate family life, ethereality with the quotidian, and, when we least expect it, the theoretical plane drops off suddenly into the abyss of the too, too real. In these poems of pith and sizzle, 'Love [is] finding fleas in the fur of our sisters.' Sisters, you may believe it."—Nance Van Winckel, author ofNo Starling