Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes by Michele Herman

In Just Another Jack Michele Herman slyly enters the territory of seemingly simple nursery rhymes and, with robust and gorgeous language, reimagines a complex and highly nuanced world. As in the transformations by Sexton and Broumas, Herman’s persona poems imagine the deeper losses, hungers, desires and desperations of characters like the lean-eating Jack Sprat and his fat-loving wife or a child of the old lady who lived in the shoe. The resilient voices that rise from these poems are startling; akin to a sudden reveal of the hidden lives and tragedies of close neighbors you thought you’d known.

–Victoria Redel

In Michele Herman’s inventive, poignant poetic fictions, eight nursery rhyme characters reveal their hopes, sorrows, and dreams, with startling vulnerability. As the Oldest Child who lives in a shoe confesses, “it’s hard to breathe in here I open up the lace and roll the tongue up high I wish I had some help”—a feeling all readers will understand. Just Another Jack is a fresh, unique angle on the human condition.

–Lisa Bellamy