Forty-One Jane Doe's

Poetry. Film. Book + DVD. Immersed in the continuum between death and desire, the detective of these poems is ever at the mercy of meteorological phenomenon and outside stimuli. As she searches and reaches toward an elevated understanding (employing outdated science experiments with strings, pigeons, and tin cans, and enlisting the help of the Scientist, the Astronomer, and the Aviator along the way), she stumbles upon more questions than answers. "I don't know why this one or that one. But I know desire." A woman knows her body...until it is exploded into a multitude of Janes. A DVD of three video poems, created by the author, accompanies the book, speaking to these multitudes. The reader is initiated into the dilemma of the Janes, who staunchly proclaim, "Reader, you and I have been lashed / by the weather."

"I am in love with how Carrie Olivia Adams captures the visible and the invisible, how she wonders about pinpricks and stars, possibility and fate, how she demonstrates that seasons are incidents, snowflakes are clues. Her world is one of startling moments and minutiae, the mystery of the sublime and the mystery of the everyday. Her poetry reminds us to always pay attention, to always be in awe."—Jenny Boully

"Written in tandem with her short films, Carrie Olivia Adams's FORTY-ONE JANE DOE'S investigates the nature of desire and remorse through the prism of anonymity. Tuned with paradoxical introspection ('Self or selfless, / I am in the way'), Adams's lyrical sequences culminate in a savage title poem that declares, 'It is the sin in me that says I.' This bracing second collection weighs the parts of us that remain unknown, even to our confidants."—James Shea