The Equalizing Jokebook by Rose Novick

Somewhere at the heart of every event in the universe, there is an ever unfolding process indistinguishable from what we might call ‘play.’  In The Equalizing Jokebook, Rose Novick knows this.  ‘Who can find the logic of this?’ these poems ask of our world.  ‘Truly our thoughts fall short of the gods’.’  And yet, for Novick, this is not a lamentation, for the epistemological horizon is a place to dance, to laugh, to stare into the unknown and sing.  This, quite simply, is one of the most original, whimsical, and yet well-wrought gatherings of poems I have encountered in quite some time.  Open it and enjoy it, ‘featherlight, freely and easily.’

–Joseph Fasano, author of The Swallows of Lunetto

Rose Novick’s debut collection, The Equalizing Jokebook, offers the reader an astonishing journey from Zhuangzi (from which the collection draws its title) and an assortment of Greek philosophers to Paul Klee and the “mirrordark” water of the muddy Wabash. A deeply learned book that nevertheless wears that learning lightly, Novick’s collection alternatively breaks your heart and then busts your gut, and it does so while asking the questions we all care most deeply about: identity, loneliness, joy, purpose. The contents and their intellectual underpinning at times evoke a contemporary poet like Troy Jollimore, but so often Novick branches out in new and exciting ways: nonce metrical forms, engaging perspectives, surprising metaphor. Her figurative language frequently calls the reader to relate to the most overlooked lifeforms, as the wonderful sonnet “Low Tide” compares tragic miscommunication to “barnacles that guessed wrong.” In this, and so much more, Novick is a poet who resists pandering to the reader and who trusts her own voice. She is exceptional at creating engaging rhythms: her poems range from prosimetra to syllabics to more traditional English iambs. Indeed, Novick delights above all in the beautiful sounds which language offers, in particular excelling in subtle assonances and consonances that cause the reader to stop and smile. This collection demands to be read aloud, and I don’t know that a higher praise can be given to a collection of poetry than that.

–Andrew Szilvasy, author of Witness Marks