Blue Structure

"Terrifying in courage and grace, the poems of Jan Freeman's Blue Structure explore the brutal architecture of love, grief, and survival. Freeman writes 'Blue is above your head and you cannot touch it/though it is almost always there' and yet Freeman manages to graze and grasp love's luminous azure shards. In the strange wounds that great loves know, Freeman opens language to its throat and bones. These poems are horizons, tunnels, gardens, holes, mazes, curtains, stones, fences, mythologies, branches, windows, and hands. These poems, elegiac and muscular, ache and sing. Freeman's muted voice soars, deft and searing, as it ripples with piercing depth. Here, we discover again what exists, spoken and unspoken, about those who endure the full tilt of life: 'If loneliness becomes freedom, ring the bells.'" -Rachel Eliza Griffiths "'After great pain, a formal feeling comes' Dickinson taught us, and I can't escape those words as I read through Jan Freeman's poems of remembrance, her elegies-or, wait, not elegies exactly, but musical symphonies of mourning, where silence is the most important instrument. It is a book that teaches us how to say good bye to the walls, to our arms, yes. We learn that 'hands, like boys, when the sky is blue, disappear,' yes. And, yet, this a magical book, stands up to silence with 'voices' which do not console against the mystery of death, but open it to us. And so the silences are those we once heard. When? Before the language itself, perhaps. Before it invaded our lungs, our mouths. How one person's throat is shaped by other person's rages, how each of us stands 'like a section of a fence, disconnected,' how we love-yes, love, that most of all-you learn in this book, this strange, wise, marvelous Blue Structure to live with." -Ilya Kaminsky