"Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review

"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi

"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review

"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal

"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review

"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

"Anyone who admires visceral, jolting, in-your-face poetry will be rightly enthusiastic about this debut by Jane Mead. . . . Mead's la

These lyric elegies, spoken by the "under-self," become a series of subtle chants which sing the speaker into being both physically and spiritually, and through which Mead seeks solace, enlightenment, and joy in the cycles of life and death in the natural world.

From "The Origin":

Twice I have walked through this life-
once for nothing, once
for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool-
glassy-winged sharp-shooter
on the failing vines. Count me-
among the animals, their small
committed calls.-
Count me among
the living. My greatest desire-
to exist in a physical world.

Jane Mead is the author of two previous collections of poetry, House of Poured-Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years the Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages the family ranch in northern California.