Ten by Jennifer Firestone

Using her recovering body as a constraint for poetic inspiration, Jennifer Firestone has written poems that are limpid, elemental, tranquil, and full of light.

—Cathy Park Hong

For poets, constraints are a bucket dipped into the sea of language, a way of measuring what otherwise can seem like infinity. Firestone sets up a constraint to keep her alive and in time: "write 10 lines a day—no matter what." To convey the fullness of this experience, Firestone weaves lyrical but real prose narratives into the book that ground the poems within the chaotic gestalt of hospitals, medication, and doctors who use strange metaphors to describe their procedures. More than a book of poetry, Ten is a generous blueprint for how to maintain creativity when something like surgery (or the state of the nation) tosses you out of your life and into the swelling, throbbing, regulating reality of “present practicing.” As Firestone writes, “that’s what artists do.”

—Kristin Prevallet

Floating within a frame: A window seen from bed while awaiting meds. A question about how to deal with pain. A harder question about how to establish order and rhythm, how to contain without overdetermining, blurring, or violating view. A question about writing—how it performs adjacency, counterpoise, temporary stability. How should chaos be parenthetically constrained? How can writing, as frame, be willed to unreign? Ten is a method. Ten is also pleasure, hard-won. Firestone has discovered a marvelous way to mean to go on.

—Catherine Wagner

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming), Ten (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on Other Influences, a book about feminist avant-garde poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also Director of the Academic Fellows pedagogy program.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 70 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-289-1