If "America" is a nation of enthusiasts (for good or ill), the poems in
this book can be thought of as their anthems. The adventurer, the
speculator, the minister, the naturalist, the bandit, the mother--all
have some purchase here. Starting from the notion of the ode as "a poem
sung by a chorus," these poems campaign for a heroic "voice of history"
spoken by individuals. The resulting tensions, between prose and poetic
lines, between narrative and song, are revealed in the anxiety of genre:
the ode turns into epic; the song turns into jeremiad; the master
narrative is cut short by the hired hand going about her business.
Throughout, regular people get to act in their own epic situations as
global events lumber in the background.
Born in New York, Jean Day grew up in Rhode Island and moved west in
the 1970s to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has been active in
the literary community ever since. She is the author of five previous
books of poetry, most recently The Literal World, and her work appears
in many journals and anthologies, including Best Poems of 2004, edited
by David Lehman and Lyn Hejinian. She is the recipient of fellowships
and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the George A. and
Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the California
Arts Council, and the Fund for Poetry.
