Kristina Jipson’s Halve peels away the layers of orderly narrative with which we try and tame the chaos of mourning. At once frank and elusive, Jipson’s poems resist the pull of storytelling and personal confiding, instead using formal variation to embody emotion and memory. These poems lay bare the experience of losing a brother and evoke the haunting that results as language fails to contain either grief or the love that precedes such a loss.

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-71-4

Kristina Jipson holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, At Length, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, and DIAGRAM. She is the author of two chapbooks: Lock, Means (Dancing Girl Press, 2011) and How Void of Miracles, (Hand Held Editions, 2009). She teaches in the Seattle area, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.

“Halve is a quite beautiful book, full of feeling and formally inventive, having a true lyric line in ways I respond deeply to, and an elliptical quality that seems necessary to the slip-pages of mind in perception and memory.” — Dan Beachy-Quick

Selected Poem [[untitled, the book’s prologue:]] As transparent bodies suffer light to pass through them, retouching greens the trees visible through the glass with bursts of fill-in flashes to lift the shadows. Perhaps his hair was dark and it was sun cast on it that made him seem blond. A vision she says but it was wrong to ask for messages we didn’t want. I would not let him in. Come unexceptional this to tell us now we are here and little more definite as visions than as bodies limply passing through denser mediums to empty these rooms of every sound.

.5 lbs

9 × 6 × .5 in