Observable Readings

Where things world into great opportunity, as Maude Blessingbourne reminds us, it is frequently in the mood of boredom, and as the first poem in Jane Mead's second book reports, "To Break the Spell Is to Invite Chaos Into the Universe: "It would be easier | If I did not exist - | but I did."  The person here is Kaos.  To destroy, and make chaotic, this author splits the word's allegiances between flesh and report to make a new world: "Earth or music? || The music as earth: just so: | The horizon beyond the horizon."  Mead's poetic compass leads her not in circles, but toward a horizon of tragic speech, the destiny of which worlds its speaker into a "center speaking." Or, as the only bird of poetry (the Owl) says:  "Too early.  Too late."

Mead was born in 1958 into a family that joined two distinct American clans. The grandfather on her father's side co-founded Union Carbide and Carbon Co., whose chemical patents formed the basis for the American petrochemical industry.  On her mother's side there are extraordinary women scientists throughout an extended family tree that includes Mead's great-grandfather, Thomas Hunt Morgan, the 1933 Nobel winning embryologist.  Morgan's work on the heritability of traits in the drosophila fruit fly contributed to ongoing work liberating chromosomal theory from the methods of natural history, ultimately demonstrating connections between chromosome and gene that formed the basis of modern genetics.

Educated at Vassar, Syracuse and the University of Iowa, Mead divides her time between her family's farm in Napa Valley, California, and Iowa City.  Her first chapbook, A Truck Marked Flammable, appeared in 1991, the same year her shoreline crisis ode, "Concerning the Prayer I Could Not Make," was chosen for The Best American Poetry anthology.  The latter poem was included in The Lord and General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996), her first full-length volume, which received a Whiting Writer's Award.  It was followed by  House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001), and The Useable Field (Alice James, 2008).  She's worked at Berkeley, in Winston-Salem (at Wake Forest), and at Washington University.

Mead is among our most prophetic, Blakean faithful--the faith is in poetry to de-world or make whole our various and tragic positivisms.  Hers is a poetry of our startlingly familial crisis, and our mending crux of clarity.   Click here to read some of Mead's work and here to read a short interview with her.

Collage-like, elliptical, intense, passionate for lists and rivers, Kerri Webster's work is swift moving and filled with all manner of life. Inside, we find Joseph Cornell's boxes, a barn owl, John Wayne, ungulates, Rilke, leaded panes, elixir bottles, loneliness, pollen. The voice is sharp, lyrical, multifaceted, and intimate. Also, it occasionally winks, as in the poem "The Book of Matthew:"

This is the summer list: Lone Elk, Carmelite
novena, pregnancy test, Pink Sisters, confluence,
Thin Inn. One of those items comes first,
guess which.

A Writer in Residence at Washington University from 2006 to 2010, Webster currently teaches and writes in her native Idaho. Her second full-length book of poetry (which won the Iowa Prize) will be published this April. It promises to be a powerful collection--home of the extraordinary poem "Little Ornaments"--and a title that will get the attention of St. Louisans immediately (because soon, three dynamic words from our regional vocabulary will be gracing poetry shelves everywhere: Grand & Arsenal).

Kerri Webster's first book, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), won the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Psalm Project (2009) and Rowing Through Fog (2003), which won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. Among other honors, she has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Crazyhorse Emerging Writer Prize, a fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including Boston Review, The Gettysburg Review, High Chair, Indiana Review, and Super Arrow. To read a sample of her poetry, including "Little Ornaments," click here.