Imposition of Form on the Natural World by Jayne Marek

Jayne Marek’s poems take one as deeply into the natural world as a trip into a back canyon. Her voice is acute, aware, ever alert for the slightest rustle of movement in both the forest floor and the human psyche. These are taut, exciting, readable poems, written by a lover of language. And while these poems may seek to impose form on the natural world, Marek, like Robert Frost, knows that nature may win the battle.
–Sonia Gernes, author of What You Hear in the Dark: New and Selected Poems

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

With this new book, Jayne Marek contributes to an ongoing conversation about how we humans project our fears and desires onto the animal world —think of Stevens, Frost, Moore and Bishop.
Moving from aardvarks to zebus, Marek’s poems complicate fixed notions of “predator” and “prey.”

–Karen Kovacik, Indiana Poet Laureate, author of Metropolis Burning

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Marek’s precise and cadenced language examines the natural world with controlled candor and patient fascination. These are poems of translucent toughness, tempered sensuousness, and brittle lyricism. Nature is often shown to be brutal and bleak, yet the poet displays a guarded reverence that I find convincing. I trust this poet as she observes “pigs like tanks hidden in reeds” or nightjars “streaking down invisibly in black air” or the carcass of “a man-sized German Shepherd, red with white ribs showing . . . along the roadside.” As the title suggests, there is a certain rigor of voice, of form, of observation that gives these disquieting poems of nature a resonant authority.

–Orlando Menes, author of Furia

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]