Learning the Names by Jessica Purdy

“While the poems in Jessica Purdy’s Learning the Names are armed with a reality made in the image of those most overshadowed of gods they more often than not move and unfold with the logic and intensity of dreams, multi-filing and lifting off from these infinitely-felt memories, their assorted voices just coming to, recovering, what once was thought unfailingly lost, not only by naming but re-christening, striking a-new, thus attaining this unseen kind of omen-status, so camera-ready and ever-inventive, so dramatically and menacingly available at times, they gain one a sort of newly sung reason, understanding.”
–Mark DeCarteret

“Jessica Purdy charges everyday acts with the power of transformation. Outside her door, the wing feathers of a pigeon are ‘splayed open in a version of praying hands;’ walking alone, lust becomes ‘like a blue river churning dirt,/ a river that dumps itself/ depleted at the origin.’ Questions of love, mortality, and the strangeness of being sing through these beautifully observed poems of discovery and reinvention.”
–Joyce Peseroff