White Pine Press / April 2015
Buy local via Indiebound / Amazon
ISBN-13: 978-1935210665
- Winner of the 2015 New Mexico Book Award in Poetry
- Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
- Longlist Finalist for the Julie Suk Award
- An Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association
A Biography-in-Poems of Georgia O’Keeffe. Meticulously researched and richly imagined, these vibrant persona poems push past O’Keeffe’s legend to tell the artist’s story in her own voice. Interwoven throughout are lyric prose meditations from the poet’s month spent alone in a primitive desert cabin. A narrative-driven collection that reads like a novel, this book delves into issues of creativity, feminism, and relationships, while allowing a reader to travel to turn-of-the last century New York City; the wilds of Canyon, TX; and the New Mexico high desert of the 1930s and today.
“Georgia O’Keeffe’s remarkable life and work inspired this poetic meditation on everything from the pleasures and pains of love to the transformations that time works on an individual. And just as the artist distilled the essence of her subject matter, abstracting from flowers and bones, landscapes and clouds, a vivid story of her walk in the sun, so Jessica Jacobs discovers a vibrant music rooted in portraiture. ‘How little it takes/ to make home unfamiliar,’ she writes. And home in this stunning book turns out to be the entire universe. Make yourself comfortable. There is so much to taste and see.”—Christopher Merrill, Necessities and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon
“What is often called ‘inspiration’ in art is, more accurately, obsession: it is what gives life to language, as Jessica Jacobs’ obsession with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe makes these pages breathe and O’Keeffe a living voice and presence. Interwoven with these sharply incised, vibrant, and painstakingly researched poems are lyric prose accounts of the author’s own time alone in the desert, drawing these poems and a deepened awareness out of this accompanied solitude.”—Eleanor Wilner, Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems
“In her eloquent poems, Jessica Jacobs artfully intertwines her own voice with Georgia O’Keeffe’s words in this poet’s exploration of the painter’s sensitivity, aesthetics, character, and courage.”—Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe
Reviews
“A sensuous homage to Georgia O’Keeffe, the patron saint of the American Southwest, and her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz.”—Sarah Meyer, O, The Oprah Magazine (Circle of Friends)
“I don’t know when I’ve encountered a poet with more aesthetic range than Jessica Jacobs. Her dazzling debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, epitomizes both what is possible and what is desirable in not one but five distinct poetic forms: the confessional poem, the persona poem, the nature poem, the epistolary poem, and the ekphrastic poem. In other words, no matter who you are, you will not want for anything in this book. And that’s even before I tell you that Pelvis with Distance is also an elegantly braided, tripartite love story in which you will find yourself, inevitably, implicated.”—Julie Marie Wade, The Rumpus
“In this detailed, raptly lyrical debut collection . . . Her long, admiring, well-researched examination of a woman very used to being looked at switches with ease among points of view, while paying homage to O’Keeffe’s passion for solitude and her independent eye. In a project constructed as a set of short poems, each keyed to one moment, Jacobs finds ways to vary her pace and her forms, from very short lines to thick prose paragraphs: her tones, however pursue a rapt, observant constancy. This work should delight the painter’s many fans, and its sentences evoke her paintings’ beauty.”—Publishers Weekly
“Artists and writers share many things, including a passion for observing and detailing the natural world. In this wonderful debut collection, Jacobs crafts a portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe and the striking landscapes she painted . . . Jacobs vivifies both desert landscapes and New York City, where O’Keeffe first met Stieglitz, but she does more than describe how the vistas look, delving deeply and making philosophical connections: ‘A door// is everything a painting/ wants to be. Portal, promise.’ . . . VERDICT An outstanding collection that focuses on art and biography, anchored by a rich sense of place.”—Doris Lynch, Library Journal
“The poet biographer becomes one with her subject while delving into artistic and personal periods of O’Keeffe’s life, moving from paintings to photographs to correspondence. Jacobs’s poems often speak in a version of O’Keeffe’s voice, yet as a poetic biographer, Jacobs remains true to her subject by remaining true to herself by adding herself into the biography. Therefore, unlike many biographers, she refuses to give life to her subject by erasing herself entirely. … In this way, the collection complicates and examines the difficult terrain of distance and perspective while also daring to question the difference between the person and the persona in the public and private lives of artists.”—Aimee Parkison, American Book Review
“Through her hard work, dedication, mastery of language, and most of all her passion, Jessica Jacobs has been able to ultimately translate her intellectual and emotional connection to the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe to her own life and poetry, and has produced the seminal biography—in-poetry of Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis With Distance.”—Pat Cypher, Chronicling Georgia O’Keeffe
“Over the course of this collection, I was impressed with Jacobs’s poetic range . . . In a biography-in-poems about such a vivid, diverse and talented painter as Georgia O’Keeffe, there is a lot of pressure to do justice not only to her work, but also the landscape of northern New Mexico; Jacobs does just that – brilliantly painting with words bouquets of color, texture and desert light.”—Laurel Nakanishi, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine
“Through the friction between the O’Keeffe’s poems and her own diary, Jacobs opens space to contemplate, asking the reader to consider the extent to which we need human companionship and why. . . Pelvis with Distance is a beautifully-written book, full of sharply-rendered images and the wisdom of lived experience. Throughout, Jacobs raises compelling questions, shedding light on both the tenuousness and the tenacity of human connections.” —Alix Anne Shaw, Los Angeles Review
“Subtitled A Biography in Poems, this audacious collection does just what most biographies set out to do–chronicle a life so thoroughly that the reader actually feels like an intimate of the subject. O’Keeffe’s creativity and independence shine through in poems wrought of color and inflection. . . Pelvis with Distance is an incredibly ambitious work, but amazingly, it fulfills all those ambitions and provides moments where you simply must put the book down and think.”—Jerry L. Wheeler, Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews
“Throughout the collection, Jacobs uses some lovely language – lush and sonically strong. For example, in ‘Red Barn in Wheatfield’, she writes: ‘until I couldn’t help but turn / pebbles on my tongue. Burr of silt. Their shapes / still bloom behind my tight-shut teeth’ (20) . . Jacobs writing as O’Keeffe is lively, energetic, and wry.”—Eve Kenneally, Cutbank Review
“Pelvis with Distance is an astonishing piece of creative work. Readers who have experienced the current touring exhibit: Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern will find this book a great addition—it could have served as part of the exhibit catalog as it evokes much the same feeling about O’Keeffe’s life and work as the exhibit does. And readers whose only knowledge of O’Keeffe’s work comes from the flower posters on their dorm walls, will be amazed to learn a bit about who the artist really was: classically-trained, self-curated Modernist, independent, tough, and vulnerable to great loves.”—Kali Lightfoot, Broadsided