Jules Jacob’s anthem to love and loss, is a fierce testimony to forgiveness and redemption. These arresting poems move like a pool of water, ripples and vibrations map the relationships—parental, siblings, lovers, nature—imbued with the resonant joy and pain of living in such a fragile world. This artful weave renders how the cycle of life replenishes and reseeds, as these poems tender so lyrically a generative healing. Jacob’s brave narrative explores the self with all flaws, vulnerabilities, and traumas, and threads an astounding bountiful chorus of language, accompanied by a windfall of sublime epiphanies. “If found, we return rearranged.” With razor sharp imagery, the speaker gives us a wisely voluminous heart, rich with dimension and clarity. Jacob’s gripping voice creates an indelible alchemy of beauty, forgiveness, and humanity. These potent poems sing an aria of love and light— Yes, read this collection to be startled into awakening.
— Cynthia Atkins, author of Still-Life with God
In Kingdom of Glass & Seed, Jules Jacob writes with an attentive eye to the smallest details of flesh and flower: “treasures where others see / nothing unusual.” These poems enter the dislocated world of foster care and addiction in language that is deeply attuned to the rawness of experience, where nature is both haven and metaphor. “All mothers can be as happy / as their troubled child” writes Jacob in a collection that seeks forgiveness not retribution, that holds suffering in a tender, but alert gaze.
— Jessica Cuello, author of Liar and Yours, Creature
Early in Jules Jacob’s riveting new collection, in the poem “My Mother Eats Wyoming” we find the lines
in matchbox beds while they recovered
from amputations guaranteeing
the patients couldn’t escape.
And there it is: beneath the title’s light-fingered surreality (the book’s signature tone), scenes of hardscrabble tenderness and sometimes unbearable cruelty, scavenged and placed ever so carefully side by side in memory’s reliquary. And so it goes, too, in line after stunning line. What did Rilke write? Every angel is terrifying. A truth Jacob seems to know in her bones and one, reading these poems, we feel in ours.
— Daniel Lawless, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry
Kingdom of Glass & Seed released for presale by Lily Poetry Review Books.
Lily Poetry Review Books accepts Kingdom of Glass & Seed for October 8, 2023 publication.
White Stag Press To Publish and Illustrate Rappaccini's Garden, A Collaborative Collection of Poisonous Plant Poems by Jules Jacob and Sonja Johanson
Joined Lily Poetry Review Masthead
Reading for virtual Wednesday Night Poetry, Hot Springs, AR
Rappaccini's Garden awarded 2nd place - The Heartland Review Press 2020 Chapbook Contest
Voices from Home, A Virtual Reading of poets in MER 18's Home Issue
The End Will Not be Sugared: Contemporary Apocalypse Poetry The Cherrity Bar
AWP 2020 Reading
In Rappahannock Review - Contributor Spotlight
Poetry Reading, Pagination Bookshop, Springfield MO
Kingdom of Glass & Seed, Full Length Collection
(Lily Poetry Review Press, October 8, 2023)
Rappaccini's Garden, Collaborative Collection
with Sonja Johanson
(White Stag Press, December 2023)
Jules Jacob is the author of Kingdom of Glass & Seed (forthcoming Lily Poetry Review Books, October 8, 2023), The Glass Sponge, a semi-finalist in The New Women's Voices Series (Finishing Line Press), and co-author with Sonja Johanson of Rappaccini's Garden (White Stag Press, forthcoming December 2023). Her poems are featured in Lily Poetry Review, Plume Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Jules is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Le Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France.
"This artful weave renders how the cycle of life replenishes and reseeds, as these poems tender so lyrically a generative healing."
— Cynthia Atkins, author of Still Life with God
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