The poet serves up a series of tasty elegies to Jackson Pollack, Larry Levis, avocados, and Johnny Depp, among others. Winner of the 2001 Associate Writing Programs' Award in Poetry. Original. (Poetry)

Brave Disguises (Pitt Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Jacobik, Gray

Poetry

University of Pittsburgh Press

Gray Jacobik’s The Banquet is a feast of opposites, a carnival of contraries. The highwire walker who has created such poems is perfectly balanced between heaven and earth. It is rare to encounter truth-saying that is so wholly sensual and philosophical, sexual and intellectual at the same breath-taking moment, so witty but also sober in its assessments, so utterly simple and complex. None have seen, smelled, tasted, heard and touched this world with greater love and accuracy than Gray Jacobik, while at the same time sensing the world of spirit with every ounce of her being. Most importantly, her poems are inherently moral in their visceral refusal to espouse conventional morality, their insistence on raising it to a higher level. You will find yourself singing as you emerge from this carnival of mind and body and spirit!

The Banquet

Poets Choice Publishing

The poems in this finely honed collection are of two kinds: those that seek to represent the world in its ephemerality, and those that generate a world's unfolding. Along a spectrum of various oppositions, in landscape and love poems, and in those that speak of music, painting, and film, Gray Jacobik enacts her double task: to bring our world palpably close and to transform that experience into art.

The Double Task

University of Massachusetts Press

In the opening poem of The Surface of last Scattering, the poet asks "How shape a full-bodied intelligent speaking for an open-hearted listening?" In pursuit of the possibilities engendered by this question, Gray Jacobik writes meditative lyrics, essay-poems and prose-poems as grounded in the mind as in the body, poems that assume, and reward, an open-hearted listening. Ascribing to no one school of poetics, and no one style, Jacobik is unafraid of either spare language or a language of high color. She uses a range of resources from verisimilitude to abstraction to write poems that are at once instruments of knowing and passionate songs.

The Surface of Last Scattering: Poems (X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize)

Trp: The University Press Of Shsu

Little Boy Blue is a lyrically-charged dramatic monologue in the voice of a mother to her absent son. In twenty-three movements, the speaker reveals the facts, feelings, textures, perspectives and sensations that inform this most personal and intense relationship, one that survives betrayal, abandonment, neglect, mental illness and other calamities of contemporary American life. Occupying the ground between poetry and prose, and with an ever-gathering momentum and passionate intensity, Jacobik examines motherhood, sanity, and heartbreakingly tender, resilient love.

Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse (Notable Voices)

CavanKerry Press

In Eleanor, Gray Jacobik presents sixty-two poems written in the voice of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Set against the backdrop of many of the major national and international events of the twentieth century, this famous historical figure has much to say. This collection includes poems about Eleanor’s husband Franklin, her children, her mother-in-law, her intellectual mentors, and her most passionate and intimate friendships. Other poems focus on Eleanor’s evolving relationship to servants, issues of class and human rights, as well her service to the world community. Jacobik’s monologues constitute a sustained imaginative work that embodies Eleanor Roosevelt’s emotional experience, moral conflicts, fears, losses, desires, and aspirations. Eleanor Roosevelt was a bold and outspoken advocate for issues that are still relevant today: social justice, economic security, freedom from war and violence, and the rights of workers and immigrants. Modern readers will find much to admire, and much that resonates, in the themes of this collection. Publishing one hundred years after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this collection reminds us how far we have come, and how much further we have yet to go.

Eleanor

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