How to Live on Bread and Music

Beloved in classrooms, these poems broadly explore themes such as identity formation, nostalgia, and impermanence, passing through risk to find refuge in the sensory world.

Life-affirming but without illusions, How to Live on Bread and Music showcases poet Jennifer K. Sweeney's mature consciousness and circumspect intelligence. This collection takes us on a physical and spiritual trip, symbolized in recurring images of the train. Exploring broad themes such as identity formation, nostalgia, and impermanence, the poet passes through risk to find refuge in the sensory world. What is most remarkable is Sweeney's ability to confide without burdening, her talent for arranging enough silence between words for us to locate the pulse of meaning.

"Jennifer K. Sweeney's How to Live on Bread and Music is a remarkable achievement from the hand of a poet with a subtle and compassionate mindfulness. These are poems that tell us we move forward in moments when motion seems all too risky and stillness all too intolerable. Adept at the delicate project of inventiveness in the line, she shows us time and again that language is the matter of the poet and that there is surprise in the gift, as this book is sure evidence of the gift."--Afaa Michael Weaver, James Laughlin Award judge

"Each of Jennifer K. Sweeney's poems is part of her quest to be fully alive to the beauty, terror, and wonder of living. Oh life with your falling open, / April is eating itself alive / and I can hear the splitting of the dahlias / when I sleep. Rich in sound patterns, imagery, and metaphor, and packed with surprise, these poems take special joy in wild and juicy words: for example, 'lyrate,' 'paldrons,' 'guillotine/ of wind' 'the sloop and slag of childhood,' 'deckled,' and 'lantern-hearted.' Enter Sweeney's world, and perhaps you too will become lantern-hearted." --Annie Boutelle

"In Jennifer K. Sweeney's How to Live on Bread and Music we discover words that weigh the earth carefully and sing it into existence for this poet knows 'song is the yeast / when the body wants.' Her poetry is 'pained with sensation' and has the power to transform the reader, to resurrect dandelions from a field of armor." --Mark Irwin

"Jennifer K. Sweeney's second collection of poems is generous and sympathetic, melodic and transforming. Her playful yet incisive language, rich in imagery and metaphor, serves the larger purpose of helping us see our relationship to each other and the natural world with fresh eyes." --Apalachee Review

"How to Live on Bread and Music is not only a volume of great range and depth, but is full of sonorous, deeply felt poems that evoke Marianne Moore's famous adage that our best verse strive to create 'a place for the genuine.'" --Emprise Review

Poetry. Women's Studies.

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska, 2020), Little Spells (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2015), HOW TO LIVE ON BREAD AND MUSIC (Perugia Press, 2009), which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with Perugia pressmate, L.I. Henley, will be published in 2024 from Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared widely in journals, and appear most recently in Birdcoat Quarterly, Guesthouse, OneArt, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Terrain, The Shore, and Waxwing.