Jackknife: New and Selected Poems - Jan Beatty

nIn Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body--not in a confessional voice, not autobiography--but arriving through the expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders.

n The new poems leap imagistically from the known world to the purely imagined, as in the voice in Abortion with Gun Barrel I am the counselor, /there are cracks in the barrel of the gun/there is aiming/shots of sorrow--/ shots of light. Commitment to a rabid feminist voice continues, but arrival has a new ring to it, with beginnings rescripted: I am a bastard./I walk around in this body of mine. n n Beatty's fascination with the highway and the breakout West jackknifes at the crossroads of the brutal and the white plains of loss--the body torn down and resurrected in the twenty first century.n