About us

Jacket2 offers commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. We publish articles, reviews, interviews, discussions and collaborative responses, archival documents, podcasts, and descriptions of poetry symposia and projects. We also publish discursive explorations and transcripts of material in the PennSound archive. Features in Jacket2 present a wide range of materials about and responses to the work of a single poet or group, and might include reissued or original poems. Jacket2 is also committed to preserving a full, searchable archive of Jacket Magazine issues 1–40, published between 1997 and 2010 by John Tranter, a database of more than a thousand pieces of criticism on contemporary poetry in addition to more than a thousand original works by poets from around the world.

Jacket2 (ISSN 2167-2326) is associated with PennSound and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of Harry Groome (C’63), whose generous endowment gift helps sustain this website. Other supporters include Elisa Caterfino Mandel (C’83), the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and the Office of the Provost at the University of Pennsylvania.

SUBMISSIONS
Jacket2 is not currently reading unsolicited submissions. Please note that Jacket2 publishes new poetry only as part of critical commentaries and features; we are not currently reading submissions of poetry.

CONTACT

Kelly Writers House
Jacket2 magazine
3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6150

email: info@jacket2.org

BOOKS FOR REVIEWS
Publishers, please send review copies to: Jacket2, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6150. Please note that we cannot guarantee reviews of books sent for consideration.

Publisher
Al Filreis

Associate Publisher
Jessica Lowenthal

Editor
Michael S. Hennessey

Managing Editor
Magda Andrews-Hoke

Contributing Editors
Julia Bloch
Pam Brown
Sarah Dowling
Knar Gavin
Katie L. Price
Steve McLaughlin
Ariel Resnikoff
Danny Snelson
Michelle Taransky
Orchid Tierney
Jess Shollenberger
Ann Vickery

Technical Director
Chris Martin

Technical Advisor
Zach Carduner
Chris Mustazza

Editorial Assistant
Madeline Chun

Founding Editor
John Tranter

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza