Spilled and Gone: Poems - Jessica Greenbaum

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as the ocean on a shiny day, and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists. At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of the good against the violence the speaker asks, why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth? A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum spills details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.