Black Radish Books is pleased to announce the publication of Dear Jack by Jill Stengel, and August
SPD Recommends book. A writer’s love of writing and an exploration of romantic love combine to take the reader on a poetic journey of questions, observations, fragments, and few answers. Travel with this Baedeker in hand through desire, through absence, presence, self, other, boundaries and the spaces between.
Praise for Dear Jack
Subtle, sly & wry, deeply moving in its deceptive simplicity, its depths unfold unexpectedly & this reader found it hard to put down until the last poignant words. —David Meltzer
In this collection of short poems, some only a few words, Jill Stengel has written a large book in psychological scope and emotional depth. These brief letters express thoughts, feelings and moods that come and go, repeating themselves, while no two are the same in their contexts, like days in a person’s life. Reading, I found myself feeling lighter, the weight of embodiment shifted by Jill, the writer’s, capacity to engage with the endlessness of ambiguity and paradox, desire and seeking. —Patricia Dienstfrey
Obsessive love keeps tumbling down the hill in Jill Stengel’s Dear Jack, an epistolary revelation on the
quotidian anguish of yearning. In brief sketches on the ontology of missed connections, desire becomes a black hole of want. But smuggled here too is a peek-a-boo playfulness about the clumsy impossibility of language-ing away the body’s insistence for connection. Part letters to the unseen, part journal of craving, Dear Jack maps the hunger to quench and the greed of what stays parched. —Samantha Giles
Dear Jack may be purchased through
SPD.
