We Denizens

Poetry. If Abraham Lincoln was, as Marianne Moore says, a 'Euclid of the heart, ' then Jen Coleman, unacknowledged legislator extraordinaire, may be that little muscle's bittersweet cartoonist. I go back to and through her poems for their eerie clarity and for their keen interest in their world, which is--for better, for worse, and always for a little while longer--our own.--Graham Foust

Birds. Water. Word phantoms. A place where 'every conversation is truly about people, except when it is about dogs.' Coleman's poems are states of consciousness that most of us have inhabited at some point. Each life, each body, goes through a time when it becomes like an 'electrical outlet' with a piece of tape over it stating, 'This does not work.' Poetry stands exempt from this time. So does love. Like Bishop's 'burning boy' in Casabianca, Coleman's character watches the 'ship I could have sworn burned slowly before us.' Yet, despite poems assertion that life doesn't get better, poems teach us how to survive.--Jennifer Bartlett

Many, many pages in, the second poem reads 'In the crater at the center of truth / there are no words...' and I am stricken. Finding no words or not finding the right words is the emblem of this collection. Ants are angels. Confinement is contentment or refinement. 'Word Phantoms' unspeak themselves loudly in a complex poetics of supposition and wishes chained together by terminal connectives, repeated lines that seem almost accidental or incidental or coincidental. Or sympotomatic. Coleman's shifting words become as important to the reader as lost words are to the witty elderly parents, suffering lovers, dismayed citizens and denizens, and neighbors, all who are portrayed in these intimate utterances, these clever elegies, these tender relinquishments.--Heid E. Erdrich