Jackie O. Suffers Two Husbands and Other Poems by Jessica McEntee

Formally inventive and lushly written, these poems range from Maria Callas to the grocery store, Ancient Greece to the kitchen table.  They play and they grieve at once, venturing beyond the most difficult questions, and offering the consolation of a perfectly tuned phrase.   I’ll return to these often, and am so grateful to have found them.

–Louisa Hall, author of Speak and Trinity

Jessica Noyes McEntee’s Jackie O Suffers Two Husbands Before Claiming Someone Else’s is a wonderful debut collection! In every poem, we hear someone in love with a language that the rest of us have been taking for granted. We meet Jackie O growing unhappy with her second husband as she is “puttering through the hollowed abdomen of his yacht.” In a poem spoken by Rimbaud, we learn that “Mosques lick me / with the nap of their tongues, / but they pronounce themselves / indifferent to my flavor.” In her world, women become “frothing thuribles” and a boy becomes “a comma, wedged / into the mud of a sentence.” Come listen. Enjoy.

–Charles Rafferty, author of The Smoke of Horses