Praise for Kingdom of Glass & Seed
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
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
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
