World of Made and Unmade

by Jane Mead

Overview

Mead’s fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We’re drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938584398
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently MONEY MONEY MONEY / WATER WATER WATER (Alice James, 2014). 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. She teaches at the low residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.

Table of Contents

1

The third time my mother fell 3

Outside her window the trees 3

I bring her coffee and a bun 4

Well, let's see, my mother begins, LVS 5

In the hills above Rincon 5

The United States of America 6

And when there was nothing left 7

With the mediocre portraits 8

Remember how you wouldn't give up 9

And with her impeccable posture 10

2

We are lying in the big bed 13

Behind the filing cabinet 14

In animal darkness, before 15

I bring breakfast, balancing the tray 16

Hospice wants to interview the patient 17

Turns out Leo is one lying 18

Somewhere in New Mexico 19

The family inundates 20

How will you spend your courage 21

The tumor on my mother's liver 22

My mother says 22

3

The finest strand of deep blue yarn 25

4

This year I have disappeared 29

The hornets swarm in the diesel-filled air 30

How will you spend your courage 31

From my mother's cabin I hear them- 32

Mexico is a snake eating 33

When this is all over 33

My mother's curled up on the big bed- 34

I want to press my body 34

The mouse behind the filing cabinet 35

5

In my father's big bed 39

In my father's lab the aisles were narrow 40

In my dream my mother comes with me 41

Yes dear-I would like some wine 42

-Would you like to go to sleep now? 42

Is that MY black dog- 43

We are sitting on the side of the bed 44

My mother takes my two hands 44

Rain, and the grape sugars 45

Passing back to the house 46

At night I go for a personal best: 47

The finest strand of deep blue yarn- 48

6

My mother's every exhale is 51

On the phone, my brother Whit 51

+ /- 3 a.m 52

So we measure the morphine carefully 53

(My mother's every exhale is 53

Ben! Oh, Ben 54

Now my mother's every exhale 55

I myself do what I do best: 55

Just after seven we turned her 56

The life falls shut 56

7

The day after my mother died 59

She died on her 84th birthday 60

-The never the over the void 60

Silvia asks whether I ever feel 61

Her ashes blow off- 62

Rincon, where the Rio Grande turns 63

And the bit about the answer 64

Because elsewhere in this valley 64

In the phone photograph 65

Editorial Reviews

. . . Mead’s earthiness sometimes morphs into otherworldliness.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In her fifth book [World of Made and Unmade]. . . Mead performs a sustained feat of imagination. We are given details of a harrowing present, as ‘the patient’s’ selfhood dissipates, yet still renavigates the past and peers into an unforgiving future.”
—The Los Angeles Times

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

“World of Made and Unmade is a deep blue yarn of very fine thread. We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead’s poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacán waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up.”
—C.D. Wright

“In love and in dying, Zeno’s paradox proves to be neither paradoxical nor absurd. Rather, it vivifies each point of time into a sword-point, a needle point, a keen glint on a hillside, piercing eternity. In Jane Mead’s World of Made and Unmade, we find distances we’d never expected in the gilded lapse of time. And Mead sets these distances into motion, into a cinema of true feeling and insuperable dignity. Life is unassailable in death, and Jane Mead proves it so.”
—Donald Revell

From the Publisher