My Not-My Soldier

by Jennifer MacKenzie

Winner of the 2014 Fence Modern Poets Series. Jennifer Mackenzie's debut is an unfettered travelogue of embodied intellect and flights of gorgeous observance. Go hang yourself
in the light undestroyed tourist in the tremor of
a dirty window this is the famous border we're coming up on hidden from
ourselves like the hunter whose sudden antlers implied the death of self
in love No you shut up ) ( [That all good poetry is the poetry of exile] is bullshit, I belong to my body & try
desperately & stubbornly to unknow it The Individual distilled into
Outspoken by Fergie

136 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2014

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discussion is a cold act; it implies safety and remove from the dangers of violence, oppression and censorship. There is no room for discussion in "My Not-My Soldier," Jennifer MacKenzie's disturbing and brilliant document of the failures of language and certainty in the face of atrocity. "My heart is really beating," MacKenzie writes, "but it is meaningless to say so." In an age when people can watch war on television like it's a form of entertainment, how do we convey the true heartbreak of violence? Can truth form a sentence of itself? Do words like government, state, security mean anything beyond their empty gestures of protection and assurance? These are deeper questions than can be solved through a discourse made of ideologies, and MacKenzie allows those questions to resonate through and by the fractured lens of a daily life punctuated by horrors too unparaphraseable to simply be described. Jennifer Mackenzie transforms what's possible in language by staying close to the body, trying "desperately and stubbornly to unknow it." This book is a tremendous, epic encounter with living.

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll be interviewing Jennifer MacKenzie about this remarkable book in the coming weeks. More details to come.

UPDATE: interview available here:

http://entropymag.org/the-gauche-ness...