Cake

FINALIST FOR THE 2018 CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZE

In Jen Rouse’s Cake, delicious and tricky language transforms “a low-throated song,” an abandoned fight between those you trust. These poems demand a kind of listening which opens the body up to the wild and deep trill of passion, to “the beauty/ of knowing/ where the/ absence of/ shimmer shows/ a missing scale.”
—Ching-In Chen, judge of the Charlotte Mew Contest

Jen Rouse’s Cake wanders lusciously and delectably through love and what we learn from loss. Hummingbird Girl whirrs in the garden of these multi-textured poems, swift and ethereal, concentrated and liquid, “hypnotic and towering.” A garden’s magic exists in its sensory delights, but also its ironies: the simultaneity of the large and the small, and how “poison, briar, bramble” coexist with flowers and food. If the garden is an original contradiction, love is another. Rouse writes of how entering the garden of love can make us feel like we’ve been transported to another planet. After we eat love’s blooms, she shows us how exiting that garden can feel like “a death so sweet.” Mixed and folded, sifted and risen, the soft chorus of these poems beats, cools, and hums.
—Freesia McKee, author of How Distant the City

Jen Rouse’s Cake is a collection that is urgent, hungry, covered in crumbs and wanting. Near the end of these poems, she asks, “Is it so wrong to kneel at the altar of the exquisite?” And each poem seems to take us through this question with a tight and sensual juxtaposition: a desire to be seen, and a desire to see, to let go, to feel the ends of relationship as a beginning. These are stories of naming, of questioning, of loving and forgiving, all in poems that want us to listen, to listen, and name her: the lover, the hummingbird girl, the hunger, as she so wishes. Eat this collection—revel in the sweetness of your tongue.
—Tara Shea Burke, poet