We fault the not-quite-
Mexico river and salt
balconies. Phoenix
child, the ash will
sink in lemon-like
tubs. Look—your
license. And what a picture. Most learn
to waltz with shattered
chairs.
Your Lapidarium Feels Wrought
Jennifer Stella
March 2016
…each line opening, like spun threads, toward a myriad metamorphosis.
Ocean Vuong
Your lapidarium feels wrought is an exhibition of jeweled fragments in the form of language and experience. Beginning with raw materials, Jennifer Stella has wrought precious stones from rock, exposing crystallized, vivid imagery: hewed gems that catch and reflect light. Each poem functions as a postcard, an instant in time that harkens back to both the memory it recalls and to the moment it emerged in its new, polished state. Each instance of correspondence also speaks to the others within and across the seven cycles, via a shared parlance that spans time and space while retaining its particular, imagistic, and commemorative nature with a faint sheen of “wish you were here.” In her role and function as lapidary, the poet communicates how cutting away the opaque reveals an illuminated relationship between word and image.
About the Author
Jennifer Stella is a writer and a doctor, with an MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Calyx, Tupelo Quarterly, the Dusie Blog, and others. Her first chapbook, Your Lapidarium Feels Wrought, was published in 2016 by Ugly Duckling Presse. She has worked with the Peace Corps in Cameroon, and as an HIV/TB specialist with Doctors without Borders in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She lives in San Francisco.
Praise
A small book with large ambitions. These poems achieve themselves through keen and expansive formal constructions, each line opening, like spun threads, toward a myriad metamorphosis. Stella possesses a Dickinsonian eye for syntax and employs the sentence as a means of exploring a psychological American landscape, a terrain in which the familiar is recast into its most idiosyncratic possibilities, where the 'I and I / scale corners,' where tensions become inexhaustible points of discovery.
Ocean Vuong
Jennifer Stella’s Your lapidarium feels wrought offers a poetry that is honed and rehoned, fractal and fragmentary. In this poetry, surfaces glint. They want to invite the reader into their rutilant depths. And they want to reflect and deflect the reader into their fanciful surround. Stella sculpts language that will take on any challenge, vaulting into flight: “I write/wings of/raw sugar from/a glass-hewn bowl.”
Elizabeth Robinson
Jennifer Stella offers the strangest and truest of love poems – poems that glitter and shine with the pleasure of language and pulse with the desires that drive them. Everything is destabilized, which means everything is moving: the sun sets, the bus rolls north, the night air flies, we learn to waltz with chairs. All of life’s in dizzying play: “All I / cradle / turns to water.” But this is not a lament, this what time is, only and always motion. This is what love is too – cradling what falls through the arms.
Julie Carr
In the News
Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 32 pp, 5.375 x 7.375 in
Publication Date: March 01 2016
Distribution: Direct Only