Alli Warren

On our radar: 'Little Hill' by Alli Warren

Jacket2

During this time of slowed publication, we at J2 want to highlight some books from our (digital) reviews shelf. Today’s poetry title on our radar: Little Hill by Alli Warren (City Lights, 2020). If you’d like to review this title, please let us know: jacket2.org/contact

'Power in all its minor forms'

Two Takes on Alli Warren's 'I Love it Though'

Laura Henriksen

Davy Knittle

Two Takes on Alli Warren's 'I Love it Though'

In I Love It Though Warren thinks about how we manage to live without finding it necessary to lie to ourselves or each other about how we’re living, even after hedges enclosed the commons, even as our bosses email us all the time. She thinks about how we manage to love and care for our friends, have desires, and sometimes see to their satisfaction, how we find pleasure in resisting the scenes and actions where we’ve been told all pleasure waits; in working for and spending money.

I read this quote from a twelfth-century verse chronicle by Wace, Roman de Rou, wherein he paraphrases the displeasure expressed by some local serfs at the neighboring nobility’s incorporation of the noncultivated lands that for these serfs had previously been a collective resource, writing, “We can go to the woods and take what we want, take fish from the fish pond, and game from the forests; we’ll have our will in the woods, the waters, and the meadows.”

Recently in Jacket2

From the Jacket2 team

Publishing during the COVID-19 crisis

Jacket2

Like many of you, we are adapting to increased safety measures around COVID-19 at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses. Our work here at Jacket2 will likely be delayed and/or interrupted; our publication schedule for both commentaries and J2 content at large will be slower than usual as we adapt to the global pandemic. Many of our editors are working remotely, and we will continue to curate Jacket2 as a space to convene and sustain a life in/through poetry during times of scarcity, stress, and shifting imagined communities. We remain committed to bringing you open access content when institutional access and travel for research become compromised and complicated.

A note from the editors and publishers of Jacket2:

Reading weed acts

A review of Carol Watts's 'Dockfield'

Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell

Broad-leaved (left) and curled (right) dock. Photos by R. A. Nonenmacher.

In many ways, the structure of this poetry is parabolic. Points of reference are plotted along a curve that eventually returns to the same site of origin — the dockfield — before continuing onward. This is reflected in the release and retraction of words and images within parts of lines as well as in the broader sweep and curve of deep, transhuman time to which the text aspires.

Carol Watts’s Dockfield opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson — “Like Rain it sounded till it curved.” This attention to sound and structure also informs the opening lines of the first poem:

Step through on a curve,
a grand elliptic.

I will find you. Always.

A message sent up from simple frequencies.[1]

Cedar Sigo: 'Stranger in Town' // 2010

His voice is like an ex-husband / knocking at the door

David Brazil

In 2008, Sara Larsen invited Cedar Sigo to read in her apartment on Oak Street. The event was put on as part of her earthworm press & projects series, which was inspired in part by the Artifact reading series. (Thanks to earthworm’s defunct blog, I can report that this reading, at which the above photo “with APPARITIONS” was taken, took place on July 5, 2008.