"The season is winter. The death is the father's. The question is: How far can language take us? And when it takes us there--into silence and through silence--how exactly will we be brought back? There is grief in this book, for sure, but also something else: a wonderment that such lives as ours exist."
-- Jim Moore
Winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award.
Moving deftly in and out of “the small apartment where my mother lay dying,” laced with memory and opened into aftermath, Meridian is a study, by a probing spirit, in darkness and snow, of private sorrow mirrored in larger patterns: of celestial passage, of excavations in the opened earth. Musically cadenced, contemplative, respectful of silence--these taut, resonant lines bear not one extra ounce of language, but only and exactly what will suffice.
--Eleanor Wilner
The Plum-Stone Game
"The Plum-Stone Game is a delicate reconstruction of sense-memory and its eros: with archaeological precision Kathleen Jesme revitalizes the broken vessel of the world, giving us one beautiful version of its amphora after another. The poems hold: they retain light and joy and the fierce electric charges of the body."
-- D.A. Powell
"This remarkable book-length meditation is part memoir, part spiritual diary, but first and foremost, pure poem. Set in and submitted to the rigors of convent life, these lyrics shine with winter light.
-- Elaine Equi
Kathleen Jesme searches through the rubble of the quiet, relentless fire within. Her poems abound in an exquisite attention to detail and craft. More than variations on the theme of fire, her poems fix upon the soul of fire, which is only possible by close inspection of her own soul, and ours as well.
-- John Minczeski
