What an eye. What an ear
Noah Eli Gordon
One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t
Jacqueline Waters
October 2011
The poems in Jacqueline Waters’ highly anticipated second book make the rounds of vigilance, distraction, absorption, conviction, and trepidation, via sudden bouts of vertigo and hard poetic work. Says the author, “Some of the poems are asleep, some try to stay awake long enough to learn something, and a few employ a strategy of excessive concern with the process of their own production. Some of the poems are awake at a time they would rather be asleep.” The serial poems in this collection ignite both halves of the brain, steering clear of unnecessary intimacy or excessive aloofness as they examine how the feelings of one person are modified by the presence of others.
About the Author
Jacqueline Waters is the author of Commodore and One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, both from Ugly Duckling Presse, and A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry). More recent work has appeared in Chicago Review, Dreamboat, Fanzine, Harper’s, Little Star and The American Reader.
Praise
Her work could become the object of the year for alert readers.
Publishers Weekly
What an eye. What an ear.
Noah Eli Gordon
This ain’t abstraction, though — just the kind of poetic hyper-awareness that threatens and shapes the supraliminal state. And this lyric can be upended by its author’s turning intelligence at any time. Reading it is sort of like being happily lashed with your own Romantic delusions and Conscience.
Corina Copp, Harriet
This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.
Gina Myers, The Rumpus
The book’s title suggests an interest in binaries, oppositions, or paired alternatives. What the poems enact, however, is not the assembly of strict dichotomies but an often virtuosic display of simultaneous poetic impulses. Waters’ writing is insistently and reflexively analytical; it is also structured by affecting and highly original narrative moments and
Evan White, iO
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from Jacqueline Waters here
50 Best American Poetry Books of the Decade so Far
One Sleeps and the Other Doesn’t Reviewed in iO Poetry
One Sleeps and the Other Doesn’t Reviewed in The Rumpus
The Poetry Foundation Staff’s Favorite Books of 2011
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-83-8
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 104 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: October 24 2011
Distribution: SPD