Winter Here: Poems

by Jessica Tanck, Travis Denton (compiler)

In Jessica Tanck’s debut collection, narrative and lyric converge to confront the marks left by violence, loss, and longing. Winter Here troubles the boundaries between home and the outside world, between reverence and terror, asking whether and where safety can be found in the wake of a mother’s suicide. Both intimate and expansive, this collection revels in pleasure as much as it contends with pain. Whether studying the way a violinist is bruised in the act of playing, invoking the crush of ice around a ship’s hull during a silence, or conjuring a crown of light surrounding strangers speaking in tongues, these poems are unflinching, imaginative, and relentless in their searching. By moving between the explicit and the oblique, pairing scorching imagery with razor-edged thought, Tanck evokes a history that haunts every word and place.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2024

Reviews

[Aumaine Rose]

Terrible, holy, cautious, astonishingly hopeful. These poems stare through death, bad magic, bad love, and loneliness at a world marked by horrors and small pains and in this gaze still catch on what sparkles, what sings. Moving and intense

[Katie]

Winter Here is a collection about scars, the conundrum of grieving what most haunts us, of both longing for elsewhere and struggling to forgive ourselves for doing so. These poems show a vivid imagination plunged into shadows by loss and its aftermath. They starkly explore themes of abuse, terror, desolation, even possession, but most impressive to me are the frequent moments when profound empathy and beauty puncture through (believing you can walk through fire, finding a lonely slab of cardboard, baking a key lime pie, a phone call with a sister). I think these quiet moments are where Tanck most bears herself up for the reader, radiating a magical warmth even as she guides us like Charon through darkness.