& now my feet are maps

Poetry. "Jenn McCreary's wry, disarming, dream-imbued reformulations of fairy-tale & folk-tale quests in & now my feet are maps make for an unconventionally pleasurable and challenging read. In point of fact, she turns the conventions of fantasy- inflected diction and dispiriting roles for female characters in on themselves, in large part through as subtle a handling of poetic sequencing and tone as I've encountered anywhere lately. These poems vividly remake the ground they take from a range of familiar sources, are addressed to readers of most ages, and do mean to change the way this world's collective sense of imagination knows itself."—Anselm Berrigan "A celestial recalibration is in the Jenn McCreary line. I love being in there, and it's for us, the biggest possible version of us. 'here is my ghost voice / amplification helmet & here is the engine you built / with your blood—' One day I took these poems to a rock by the water and encountered the protrusion of fortitude from every THING around me through the lens of her book. '& alterwise by owl-light: thistle-blood & born / with a backwards heart, I wasn't always this / fragile.' This book blows my mind, and this isn't a blurb, it's a witnessing. Planets come and go, but the vibratory poems like Jenn McCreary's stay on in the breaking molecules gnawed by light."—CAConrad "Pieces of a life filtered through a fractured mind, somehow made whole by the work itself."—Kristin Hersh "& NOW MY FEET ARE MAPS is a journey poem. The feet are Jenn McCreary's feet, my feet, the feet of anyone who has come through pain and confusion brought on by people or institutions who abuse their power. Jenn McCreary's work is hacked from the 'black box' at her core. She figured out what it said, how to decode it, and recode it into poetry. The power of her images (unhinged in fairytale and play), her apocalyptic humor, her fusion of time, and her perfectly attuned guidance through devastation all serve to help us make sense 'of another dark night / I'm learning to unwait.'"—Stacy Szymaszek