Didi Jackson

Description:

In her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist. These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson’s poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Didi Jackson’s My Infinity is an infinitely expansive collection with an acute sensitivity to the infinitesimal, ‘the small thump’ of a goldfinch hitting the window, ‘the flash of gold / against the mica sky // as the limp feathered envelope / crumples into the green.’ The magnitude of the sorrows these poems address is harmonized by, and filtered through, a ravishing network of the deeply witnessed particularities, the holy details, of the natural world. Bringing sweep and texture and experimental energy to the collection are boldly imagined ekphrastic poems, originating from the work of Swedish abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint. These poems unbolt a portal, allowing Jackson to access her own visionary powers, the language of ‘hunger and awe.’ The result is a poetry so alive that it has the capacity to cradle the dead, to offer a ‘mercy that strips us naked to each other.’ I am moved and transformed by Didi Jackson’s infinity.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry 

“In the beautifully rendered book of poems, My Infinity by Didi Jackson, the speaker’s voice is meditative, pensive, and warm. Tonally, these poems represent that time of day which is near dusk and twilight, when the day is mostly finished, but is scarred with too much knowledge. My Infinity grapples with the aftermath of a lover’s suicide, alongside new love and joy. Whether it is corresponding with the visual art of Hilma af Klint or the natural world, nothing is too small for this speaker to look at, as with a microscope, and correspond with, as one might correspond with the moon. Here is a poet of witness of awe alongside the music of pain and grief, and of the ‘mercy that strips us naked to each other.’”
—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT

Description:

In her intimately compelling debut collection Moon Jar, Didi Jackson explores the life-altering and heart-rending loss of a husband to suicide. In an effort to understand this unforeseen and inexplicable act, she maps with immense candor the emotional difficulty of continuing her responsibility as a mother while attempting to regain a sense of normalcy. While grief never fully subsides, Jackson allows herself over time to rediscover love as she contends with the brutal and haunting grip of human trauma. These affirmative poems, precise and grace-begetting, exhibit an admirable self-devotion to healing and recovery that is metamorphic and cathartic. Turning to biblical narratives as well as seminal works of art by the likes of Hildegard of Bingen, Pablo Picasso, Sappho, Mark Rothko, Kazimir Malevich, Hieronymus Bosch, and Frédéric Chopin, she orchestrates a tableau of conversations around human suffering, the natural world, and impermanence. And like the Korean porcelain moon jar, these poems mark and celebrate the imperfection of existence. At once raw and vulnerable, Moon Jar shows lyric poetry to be a fundamental and permanent force for survival.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“In Moon Jar, Didi Jackson gives poignant testimony to the sorrow, rage, and piercing clarity of grief. And she bears radiant witness to the moment when bereavement gives way to new joy. These poems are breathtaking and frank, and they constitute a bridge into the regions of the inner life where words too often fail to reach.”—Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars, a Pulitzer winner

“Moon Jar is one of the loveliest and most honest books about grief and the long road back to hope and love that I’ve read in a very long time. These poems tell Didi Jackson’s story of losing her husband to suicide and the enormous grief of that loss. But they also show us how we survive such a loss, and that love and life can be ours again. I read this book once, and then again, and again. Jackson’s words comfort us, and remind us what it means to be vulnerable and human.”—Ann Hood