Want, the Lake

With all the power of a long-brewing storm, the brilliant poet Jenny Factor finally returns to make public the interior work and spoils of decades in Want, the Lake, her second poetry collection. This book spans twenty years of life—accumulated wisdom, images, and desires—with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Once again, Jenny Factor makes language ring like a sheep’s bell, like ripples on a lake where you encounter a lover. Like precise and accurate attention to the myriad truths and touchings of nature, human nature, childhood, motherhood, freedom, captivity. Turning and turning, Factor is a shimmering lighthouse of desire.

—Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002–2019

Jenny Factor crafts her couplets, quatrains, sonnets, and sapphics “on the percussive keyboard of an open heart.” In the “primal endzone” of human relationships, parenting and partnering teach that “letting / what matters go, some part I need most, stays.” The languages of natural history and psychology undergird this collection, honoring the interconnectedness of communities and individuals. An experimental, lyrical Intelligence powers these original poems.

—Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me