BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor
As a lover of Rilke, I remember reading Duino Elegies for the first time, nineteen years old, how one thick poem could sustain me for days. It was proof that exhaustion is not always the reader’s enemy: when done right, it even satisfies. It seemed impossible to read a book of Rilke’s in a very short amount of time (have I read all of his work yet?) and really understand it. Still the work sustained me, and kept me coming back. Jessica Garratt’s poems in her first book, Fire Pond, are crafted differently but stem from the same root of a good-willed doubting look at the world. They also satisfy.
For a cerebral, philosophically-minded poet, Garratt is honest. This is what invites the reader back—the no bullshit policy of her poems. The opening piece “Abstract” starts straight: …MORE
Jessica Garratt’s first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Individual poems from the collection have appeared in the North American Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, and in the forthcoming Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets’ University and College Prizes, 1999-2008, edited by Mark Doty. Currently, Garratt is a doctoral candidate at The University of Missouri, where she teaches literature and creative writing, and holds a Creative Writing Fellowship. She has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. — Ruth Joynton, Nonfiction Editor
SR: Order is an essential process in building any poetry collection, and you’ve done a fantastic job of arranging the poems in Fire Pond. How …MORE
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