[wordpress]

Hello,

I'm writing to announce that Jennifer Reeser's book An Alabaster Flask is now available from Word Press. This title won the 2003 Word Press First Book Prize and has earned praise from such poets as A.E. Stallings and R.S. Gwynn, who says, "Reeser has managed to produce a poetry of seamless craft and unmistakeable quality.” Orders can be placed at www.word-press.com and will be filled promptly.

I understand that Jennifer has been promoting the book already on Sphere via the pre-order option at Barnes and Noble's web site. Barnes and Noble lists the book as being available in late August. They were not getting their information directly from Word Press and so I have no control over when those orders will be filled, although I assume they will be filled in a timely fashion.

Kevin Walzer

[Tim Murphy]

Allow me to point out that a publisher earns twice as much on a direct sale as it does on a sale through Amazon. I had the pleasure of reading Jennifer's book in manuscript, and I urge all our members to go directly to Kevin's site and procure your copies there.

[Jennifer Reeser]

Tim, thank you, sir -- and for those interested, I've added the book's table of contents to my website, a catalogue of all fifty titles in the collection, which runs around 100 pages, along with a selected bibliography with journals in which many of the poems first were published -- form-friendly enterprises, for the most part, such as Edge City Review, PIVOT and Able Muse. You can find it here:

Jennifer Reeser




[This message has been edited by Jennifer Reeser (edited July 25, 2003).]

[Sebastian Levy]

Do Word Press not ship to destinations outside the US?

Can anyone help this poor Irishman put Jennifer in his cart, so he may whisk her away.

Jenn

Sláinte
Sebastian

[nyctom]

Well I for one am saving up my schekels for this one. Isn't it fun when you have actually chatted to the author? A big congrats to you. Well earned.

Tom

[Jennifer Reeser]

Hang on, love, I'm trying to get the 411 right now...Thomas -- <wink, wink>

[Jennifer Reeser]

wink, wink

[Tim Murphy]

We've had a discussion of Amazon/BN.com reviews over at Discerning Eye, and this is a tiny review I intend to post at each site. Jennifer just sent me her book, and it strikes me as altogether better than the manuscript I saw so long ago. Indeed, some of the poems take the top of my head off, and that's my test, just as it was the Divine Emily's. I'll also append this post to the Discerning Eye thread. Jennifer, congratulations on a wonderful first book.

Jennifer Reeser was born in 1968, the year I escaped high school. So at least two good things happened that year. Her first collection of verse, Alabaster Flask, is a knockout. Let the poet speak for herself:

Walking the Ruins

Grandmother made an art of mums and dills,
delphinium and every tender herb,
dreaming of her far-off Virginia hills,
filling the ground with life from curb to curb.

She knelt with mournful eyes the green of jade
each season, singing hymns to praise God’s pardon
and asking Him to touch the plot she’d made --
her latest work of genius in the garden.

Winter could not resist her, nor the glory
one finds by having daisies New Year’s Day,
the famous seed supplier’s cover story,
and strangers at the screen from miles away.

I never lacked for colors in that place.
Her daughter brought me up in monochrome
as elegant and cold as any face
which one time deemed itself a god of Rome,

and Mother gone, with Grandmother yet going
into that garden all will someday go,
it’s only now I see her art was sowing
a seed within me only she could grow.

This is the work of a young woman who chooses her words with great care and with refreshing accuracy. Just run the ums, ers, and ills of that first stanza through your mouth several times. She makes a delectable music, and surprise! she has a store of wisdom to impart to the lucky reader. I’d have to go back to Suzanne Doyle’s “My Grandmother’s Visit” to locate in my capacious memory so ambitious and definitive a poem on this particular familial relationship. Before that I’d reach for “Cottage Street, 1951” Richard Wilbur’s great poem for Edna Ward and Ms. Plath. To achieve this high elegiac tone at thirty-four is quite a feat, but it’s something several thirty-somethings are pulling off: Greg Williamson, Diane Thiel, Alicia Stallings, Catherine Tufariello, to name just four besides Reeser. These thirty-somethings are really something.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

I'm so pleased to see Jennifer's book receiving attention and the kudos it more than deserves! It's a beauty; I've been dipping into its pages since I received it, revisiting favorites and always settling on new ones. As I've written to Tim, the future is going to hear from this poet, and it will be the better for it.

[Jennifer Reeser]

Tim, Rhina, thank you so much for the encouragement. It means much to this punk rhymester!

Jennifer