To the Wren: Collected & New Poems

by Jane Mead

Overview

"Mead ... wrote clean, spare, often elegiac lines"—The New York Times

This massive collection houses Mead’s life’s work: seven books spanning twenty-seven years. Follow chronologically through decades and become captivated by heartfelt muses on loss, madness, danger, grief, isolation, and self-identity. Her poems explore spaces we often try to ignore and finds a comfortable middleground. Mead candidly and openly weaves together pain and joy until it meshes into glimpses of humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579018
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Pages:	650
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Jane Mead is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016) which was nominated for a National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Griffin Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she manages her family’s ranch in northern California. She has taught as a visiting writer at Washington University, Colby College and most recently, The University of Iowa. 

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/20/2019

With lyric candor and emotional precision, Mead (World of Made and Unmade) offers her family history, meditations on loss and madness, and the landscape of California wine country in this collected volume. Bringing together seven collections written over three decades, this book makes room for the many facets of Mead’s talents to shine. Her father’s struggles with addiction—along with the profound impact these struggles have on her family—are documented in Mead’s debut collection and reconsidered after his death, leading to meditative exploration of grief and remembrance. Mead bears witness to her mother through a child’s eyes, then, decades later, through the slow process of her mother’s dying. A new poem asks “Do we ever really get to go beyond the story/ we were born to.” (For the speaker of these poems, the answer is a resounding no.) Still, the natural world, in its bounty and brutality, is a grounding force for Mead, a reminder of a time scale beyond the human span. In her commitment to representing experience faithfully, Mead engages fundamental questions about the nature of knowing. Through observation, philosophy, math, science, and prayer, the reader is witness to a mind that submits itself to the world with curiosity and humility in order to see things as they really are. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Mead propels readers forward, using plain language that’s elegant in its simplicity yet compelling and heartbreaking. Even as she confronts grief and loss, the poet highlights the overriding theme of courage.”
—Library Journal

"The natural world, in its bounty and brutality, is a grounding force for Mead, a reminder of a time scale beyond the human span"—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Mead’s versatility, scholarship, and curiosity contribute to the strength of her craft. . . . Her oeuvre is so spacious that it constantly invites journeys down imagined avenues."—The Rumpus

From the Publisher