In Whatever Light Left to Us

In Whatever Light Left To Us Front

Sibling Rivalry Press / October 2016
This chapbook was a precursor to the full-length collection Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going.

“Jessica Jacobs’ In Whatever Light Left to Us is about how a great love for another woman got her to write it; poems infused not only with a serious and, at times, satiric and erotic understanding of the world facing intimacy, but poems that also look at nature and earthly landscapes with a new kind of longing, which makes the book feel invigoratingly restless and the descriptive power of that restlessness knocked me out.”
—Michael Klein, author of When I Was a Twin

“Who can resist a poet who writes, ‘If this summer is a body, let me be its tongue’? Jessica Jacobs’ poems have the clear gaze of a camera, the tenderness of the ‘tender skin of a plum,’ and the heat of a summer night in Florida. This book will leave you dizzy and wanting more.”—Rita Mae Reese, author of The Book of Hulga

Reviews

“This is poetry you can taste, and touch: poetry as incandescence of the ordinary world, a transformation of cornfields and golf courses, of ponds and swamps, of sumac and deer. . . These are love poems that stand alongside the best of that overstuffed genre, love poems that remind us that perhaps they are still worth writing, and that love, even in these dark times, is something worth attending to.”—Carolyn Ogburn, Empty Mirror

“Here is a portrait of a runner in love, a record of a love built across miles and years…. Here, too, is what I like best about Jacobs’s poetry: its attention to both the interior and natural worlds. There are bees in this book, and deer, magpies and alligators. There is also a girl discovering desire, becoming a woman who worships her wife. It’s a somber book, and also a sexy one. To read it is to be enveloped in humidity, submerged in a deep and steady love.”—Sara Watson, The Bind (a review in the form of a runner’s log!)