Halve

by Kristina Jipson

$19.95

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.

Add to Cart

Format: paperback

Out of stock

ISBN: 978-1-936797-71-4 Categories: , Tag:

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.

“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

 

kjipson225Kristina 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.

Additional information

Weight .5 lbs
Dimensions 9 × 6 × .5 in
Format

paperback

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.