Cycles and Lost Monkeys (Paperback)

In her latest collection of poems Jo Slade continues her investigation of displacement and difference and illustrates how these experiences can be transformed through poetry, a transformation that is not so much redemptive, as prophetic. These are inquisitive, sonorous, intense poems that draw us into a world where actuality and dream collide, where loneliness, grief and resilience are innate. Informed by history and personal memory, Jo Slade propels us forward, from the title poem, Cycles and Lost Monkeys, with its dark specter of surveillance, to the final section where we are confronted by the consequences of indifference to authoritarianism.

As the judges of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize 2014 commented in their citation regarding Jo Slade’s winning collection The Painter’s House (Salmon Poetry, 2013), “spareness, together with a painter’s ability to step back from the canvas, to detach, to allow light to fall on the object, is one of the great strengths of her work. There is grief here, and there is fortitude. The world in these poems is often edged with mystery, the unknowable, but the poems enact, over and over again, a sureness that we belong in this world.”

Table of Contents

I
Boy Dreaming During the Sermon
Small of the Back
Lost Years
The Superkiss
Seen from Windows
Odd Photo
Yes
At the Bay Windows
Vector
Habits
Hoarding
And Here We Are
Bad Language My Son Hears
Middle-School Boy

II
Viking Warrior
Legend
The Trench
Behind Me
Threshold
A Piece of Sandstone
Bosses
Air Stele
Capitalizing God
The Switchman and Watt
Five Lights
Tiffany
Homage to Donne
Off

III
Crypt
Now Down
Old Dumping Ground
Speeds
Bass Fishing
Maine Bog
High Marsh
Top Floor, Bennett Hall
The Fence out Back
Voices Through Static
Ice Fishing
After George Petri
Power Line
Black Pond

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