We were not even close.
Daihatsu jetsam sailed
on nuclear steam
Of course there’s no such thing
as thought streaming from the ear-
buds of those in distress
in this sense we’re all managers
fleshy bodies
of fishes larger
than the lion supreme
paw raised
like a hood ornament
in mid-stride salute
can suffer
though the door closes after us
(Never cut to a door)
The great little dictator remains poised
in the needler’s art
clueless
as to what we were
and what we were up against
Late Human
Jean Day
March 2021
lacquered and biting, like a hair clip
Sophia Dahlin
Late Human is a collection of tragi-comic poems on lateness, belatedness, Weltschmerz, and borrowing (with a nod to Ernest Mandel’s 1975 tome on the twilight of capitalism). The human of the title is multiple, personal, and drenched in the tears of the 21st century. Cracked children’s rhymes lead onto an ethnography that takes Helen Mirren’s first film appearance as seriously as Moby Dick. At the volume’s center, three laments honor the “realism / that would send anyone to spasm,” a sentiment that crests in the book’s title poem before alighting, provisionally, in “Early Bird”—its dawn chorus.
About the Author
Jean Day is a poet and editor. Her books include Triumph of Life (Insurance), Daydream (Litmus), Enthusiasm (Adventures in Poetry), The Literal World (Atelos), The I and the You (Poets & Poets), A Young Recruit (Roof), and Flat Birds (Gaz), as well as several chapbooks. Recent poems can be seen in Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, The Delineator, Across the Margin, Open House, Breather, and Jongler (French). She lives in Berkeley, where she works as managing editor of Representations, a scholarly humanities journal, and does advocacy work for members of the University Professional and Technical Employees Union (UPTE). The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the George A. and Eliza Howard Gardner Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry, Day has also benefited from the generous support of the Millay Colony, where Late Human (UDP, 2021) was completed.
Praise
Late Human is language reopened. It is not poetry of the "I"—the force of personality in these works is greater than that of an "I." Day's critical wit won't let a phrase be mere: as "The body eats the soul," as "but I don’t hate speech / just its bloody show // of fits / when the going gets ecstatic," as "Clouds puff about all matchy matchy." I want to say this book is wildly funny, but it isn't wild, it's lacquered and biting, like a hair clip. It is Day's mastery that makes each line arrive spontaneous as water over a rock.
Sophia Dahlin
Garbo managed to Laugh! in the face of American arrogance, but the clock on humoring such catastrophic folly is running out. Jean Day’s Late Human starts in this no-nonsense maw, passes through turning and loving, divines with ancient flight patterns reflected in a to-go cup, and comes out apostrophic and wise. Flashes of other works by Day repeat and relive, as if experience is chordal. It’s stunning. I can’t even tell you how vortical this gets, but 19th-cen. Realists: you’ll die here. To those of you who lie in a world of wait for the next book by Jean Day, you know there’s possibility in elegy, in complicity—both forms for her high intelligence—because we made this devoted readership together. To those for whom this new work is your first encounter, “Be not afraid / if you are blessed in this way.” This is reverent ground-writing, meant for the untimely among us who nonetheless commit to the (revolutionary) moment.
Corina Copp
Jean Day's Late Human asks the most startling questions—"Where is Brünhilde? Where is Seigfried?" "Do I have time to squeeze my kidneys?"— questions that might be humorous or innocuous if they were not so worrying. These poems really do operate in a knowing-thickness, which is consciousness of having, awkwardly over a long time, lost the way. "We are at present in a long wave / of stagnation — struggling at a dress / for which we are too old," Day writes. The beautiful authority of the mad questions, the soft desperation of the declarative note. Desmond Dekker ambles in like a skeleton in a top hat. It is as if all that happened before the pandemic is balanced on the head of a pin, the book, and now we fall.
Simone White
Praise for Previous Work
Jean Day’s Daydream is brilliantly astute, imaginative, and keen—let us not be “deaf to its obvious aptness.” Day’s discerning eye-mind upturns the world we think we live in by pondering and questioning and inviting the reader to share in the pleasure of “beautiful problems, which / arise as toughened thought.” This attention, curiosity, and reverent regard for our everyday surrounds—here local, there global—is the book’s tuning fork. Daydream makes a meal “amid the nutrionless corn” of daily modern life. Where “So / much flowering is imitation,” Day’s writing blooms singularly.
Alli Warren
Jean Day’s Daydream is a book of rich and constant activity. Thinking turns, meanders, then flits and pauses, touching everything it chances on. The poems sparkle, as thought, like the mind’s sun, reflects back from the myriad facets of things, their residues, and whatever indications they offer of things to come. For Day the poet, both world and lexicon come fully equipped; writing the poems, she encounters plethoras and embraces them, with stoic acceptance and realist skepticism. It is these that set the pace for these reveries and scintillations, and these that establish the volume’s complex, restless mood. Questions are raised, doubts are entertained (and entertaining). Humor flashes, as does pathos, both piqued by conditions and contents of the world and by words that make stabs at referring to them. And all the while, judgment is withheld. It is this refusal to judge, the refusal to curtail encounter and response, that serves as the activist principle—the reality principle—propelling the works of Daydream. This book is both provocative and miraculous.
Lyn Hejinian
'A bird shouldn't whinny/ should it? Nature prefers/ certain limits,' Jean Day writes in Daydream, a feast of thinking that lays such limits out across its table as main course. With a linguistic wit as punchy as Glen Baxter's, and an unparalleled sensitivity to American dictions that leaves some howling, some weeping, and others forever lost in thought, Day's poems have always tickled the early bird of English until it learned to whinny tomorrow's whinny. Never a misstep, Daydream is just what its title promises: the stuff of reverie—that improbable book we have all, in some moment of exasperation with language, dreamt of finding, that we might hold it like fire under the feet of poetry itself.
Kit Schluter
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-83-1
Trade Paperback
Trade Paperback. 112 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: March 01 2021
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)