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The Hyacinth Letter
In the quietest of ways it is concerned with the largest of themes. It has—perhaps from Celan, Dickinson, and Niedecker—this astonishing ability to make of the emotions an elemental space. In this way, the relational concerns that course throughout the series of poems become not merely interpersonal in nature, but oddly, subtly, gently, cosmic. That allows “night” and “darkness” to gain the phenomenological importance they here carry, but allows them to be realized in the poem not through any theoretical apparatus, but through a sense of intimacy, through the personal. That is a true gift—and one given to the reader in the most accessible of ways. There are very few poets writing today (that I know of at any rate) so invested in the metaphysical and writing in that tradition with such lightness.
—Dan Beachy-Quick
Rachel Carson wrote her “hyacinth letter” to my grandmother to explain the “lovely companionship of your letters” which provided for her a “white hyacinth for [her] soul.” For those of us who find joy and solace in nature, in loving friendship, in the expression of soul in words, Jenn Morea’s poetry is itself a lovely companion to be greeted again and again.
—Martha Freeman
Rarely have I felt so invited into the world of a book of poems, and yet so often like an intruder—a welcome wanderer at the edge of its fields, watcher within its rooms, listener beyond its walls, dweller beneath its stars—blushed and compelled to both witness and belong to something so intimate and yet familiar in its vivid expression of a pure and delicate human desire to speak.
—Mark Turcotte
—Dan Beachy-Quick
Rachel Carson wrote her “hyacinth letter” to my grandmother to explain the “lovely companionship of your letters” which provided for her a “white hyacinth for [her] soul.” For those of us who find joy and solace in nature, in loving friendship, in the expression of soul in words, Jenn Morea’s poetry is itself a lovely companion to be greeted again and again.
—Martha Freeman
Rarely have I felt so invited into the world of a book of poems, and yet so often like an intruder—a welcome wanderer at the edge of its fields, watcher within its rooms, listener beyond its walls, dweller beneath its stars—blushed and compelled to both witness and belong to something so intimate and yet familiar in its vivid expression of a pure and delicate human desire to speak.
—Mark Turcotte
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
Published February 9, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 14, 2025
The Possibility of a Fusion of Horizons
“Your letter breathes on my bedside table--a form of goodnight.”
Jenn Morea’s The Hyacinth Letter (2025) is a poetry collection I know well, as she is a close friend. I’ve read this book in various drafts over the years and have seen it evolve. Why wasn’t it published before? Because the main way poetry seems to get published (from a publisher and not self-publishing, which is another honorable way to get your work out there) is to win a poetry contest, often in competition with hundreds of submissions, which in her case she was close to winning a few times, and now she did win a poetry contest, The Sappho Prize in Poetry, sponsored by Headmistress Press.
The poetry is minimalist, spare--think Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan--where less is said than felt. It was in part inspired by Morea’s reading of this book: Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964. (Carson, Rachel, Dorothy Freeman, and Martha E. Freeman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Martha is Dorothy’s granddaughter, who lives in Maine and whom Morea visited one summer to also explore Carson’s archives nearby. The story of Carson’s and Freeman’s love also resonated deeply with Morea’s life.
Dorothy was legally married (to a man, of course), but she also fell in love with Rachel, a relationship of many years. But how is we can characterize their love, forbidden by/hidden from society? Emily Dickinson said about poetry, “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” and maybe this can be said of letters, sometimes. People in totalitarian countries tell their stories so that others can begin to understand, but those tellings may be muted, coded, metaphorical, of few words.
Thus, Morea’s poems often feature very few words on the page. Just enough to get a sense of the story or idea behind the words, the unsaid, the secret, sometimes filled with intense longing and deep understanding. Reading between the lines, we say. Morea’s afterword helps us understand the poetry’s relationship to the Carson-Freeman letters; the couple refers to coincidences and serendipitous moments as “stardust.” Some of their letters they refer to as “apples,” named after a small wooden apple that opens up to find a smaller apple inside. And as Martha Freeman explains, “Rachel Carson wrote her ‘hyacinth letter’ to my grandmother to explain the ‘lovely companionship of your letters’ which provided for her a ‘white hyacinth for [her] soul.’”
Morea arranges her poems in five sections: In a space along a margin of a field (a kind of invitation to readers: “In here with me please come”); Apples; The hyacinth letter; Apples, and In a space along a margin of a field (again, another kind of invitation, but also the place a certain rare flower was discovered--see later).
An earlier title for this book was Correspondences, which of course refers to letters, but also to relations, connections made through relationships, through exchanged language. Of course, Rachel Carson was an environmentalist, ecological researcher and lyrical celebrant of the natural world, as in books such as The Sea Around Us, so nature plays a role in these poems. We also can “correspond” through our connections with each other through our close observation of the natural world. Language is a site of correspondence--words attached to objects, actions, feelings--but also to the act of correspondence through an exchange of language.
These connections are not limited to the written word, of course; these moments of connection can take place in the shared experience of art, beauty-- the planet in all its riches--and physical connections. And through our reading texts; for instance, letters, and these poems.
Morea’s poems invite us into a world of intimacy, in the way that reading any exchange of letters might do. Secrecy. Things are unsaid, but if you read more slowly, more closely, they are nevertheless said, and revealing, in a certain way. Language, as Celan makes clear, both discloses and encloses, reveals and conceals. Expression embodies the inexpressible, as in, for instance, the legally and socially “unsanctioned” love relationships between women.
“Into a mouth/of night I slip/another/letter. This one/says take me/to your hidden/ places--trust--”
The photographer Diane Arbus wrote, "A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know." This is a common way some people think of language now, that we can’t know what language means or we can't know each other or ourselves through it. I don’t think that Morea would necessarily disagree with Arbus, though in these poems she fiercely embraces the metaphysical assumption that language can still also work the other way, too, that it can reveal.
“I am trying to tell you. On the way to the place I tried to tell you and on the way from the place I tried to tell you” but she can’t, she stops short of “actually” saying what she has actually already said in some other modality, what they both know. Language is a kind of apple that opens up to find another apple inside. It can both conceal/reveal, not say/say simultaneously.
Then of course poetry is about the revealing/concealing mechanisms of metaphor, too: ” A field/of birds is an outline of a shoulder in a room.” Words can help you see the relations, the correspondences, between things.
These relations that Morea explores happen in a kind of liminal space, along the “margin” of a field, in the shadows, in the hidden dark (and deeper richness) of night: “The water’s unseen edge,” “gradual light,” “between the paths.” The exchange of letters occurs in a site, a kind of metaphysical place, where feelings and thoughts are exchanged. The voice in corresponding language is seen as a kind of “holding” in the absence of physical touching, but it also creates actual physical and cognitive effects--desire, understanding, love.
“The world fits inside the word for it/A hand comes into/ a hand, narrating/ I see what I look like/seeing you”
“Lines of desire night blur a bird/bringing back a star’s arm”
So Morea’s poems are a kind of poetic exploration of/encounter with the ways letters work as correspondence, as language, in relationship deepening, but also how all letters (and maybe also talk, language itself, and certainly poetry) may work in and through language. It happens, Morea reminds us, in the reciprocal acts of reading and writing.
Motifs weave through Morea’s sweet poems: The color blue, stars, night, shadows, dreams. These poems are at the same time muted--a shy glance, discreet--and also exuberant, ecstatic, intimate.
One image in the last section that has metaphorical weight for the whole project of writing letters and poetry is of a “ghost flower” that was discovered “in a space along the margin of a field” in a southeastern Chicago prairie by botanist Norma Pfeiffer in 1912.
Pfeiffer collected the flower for five consecutive summers, naming it Thismia americana. It was seen each year emerging just a scant quarter of an inch above the ground, growing without photosynthesis, just a glimpse of thrilling beauty, concealed for so long, and then barely, but just enough, revealed. Like the language in a minimalist poem, just barely revealing, mostly concealed, and yet astonishing. The flower has not been seen since 2016. Is it extinct? Ask Jenn Morea (and me): No way. Searches each year continue for it, more than a hundred years later.
In thinking of the reveal/conceal conundrum in the philosophy of language I am reminded of the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was principally interested in writing about conflict that happens in dialogue, in ideological exchange, that can sometimes get resolved, even momentarily, in shared understanding. No objective knowledge exists, no complete understanding occurs forever, but participants in dialogue--in correspondence, through language--may sometimes establish a shared context through this "fusion" of their horizons. It’s the image of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, those two fingers touching, even momentarily.
So Morea seems to be saying in these poems that the fusion of horizons can happen, too, in relationships, in emotion, in love--even for moments--in part through language, through metaphor. A wonderful collection, brava, finally emerging out of the ground in time for spring here in Chicago, like a rare flower!
“A bird nests in all the trees at once.”
“Your letter breathes on my bedside table--a form of goodnight.”
Jenn Morea’s The Hyacinth Letter (2025) is a poetry collection I know well, as she is a close friend. I’ve read this book in various drafts over the years and have seen it evolve. Why wasn’t it published before? Because the main way poetry seems to get published (from a publisher and not self-publishing, which is another honorable way to get your work out there) is to win a poetry contest, often in competition with hundreds of submissions, which in her case she was close to winning a few times, and now she did win a poetry contest, The Sappho Prize in Poetry, sponsored by Headmistress Press.
The poetry is minimalist, spare--think Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan--where less is said than felt. It was in part inspired by Morea’s reading of this book: Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964. (Carson, Rachel, Dorothy Freeman, and Martha E. Freeman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Martha is Dorothy’s granddaughter, who lives in Maine and whom Morea visited one summer to also explore Carson’s archives nearby. The story of Carson’s and Freeman’s love also resonated deeply with Morea’s life.
Dorothy was legally married (to a man, of course), but she also fell in love with Rachel, a relationship of many years. But how is we can characterize their love, forbidden by/hidden from society? Emily Dickinson said about poetry, “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” and maybe this can be said of letters, sometimes. People in totalitarian countries tell their stories so that others can begin to understand, but those tellings may be muted, coded, metaphorical, of few words.
Thus, Morea’s poems often feature very few words on the page. Just enough to get a sense of the story or idea behind the words, the unsaid, the secret, sometimes filled with intense longing and deep understanding. Reading between the lines, we say. Morea’s afterword helps us understand the poetry’s relationship to the Carson-Freeman letters; the couple refers to coincidences and serendipitous moments as “stardust.” Some of their letters they refer to as “apples,” named after a small wooden apple that opens up to find a smaller apple inside. And as Martha Freeman explains, “Rachel Carson wrote her ‘hyacinth letter’ to my grandmother to explain the ‘lovely companionship of your letters’ which provided for her a ‘white hyacinth for [her] soul.’”
Morea arranges her poems in five sections: In a space along a margin of a field (a kind of invitation to readers: “In here with me please come”); Apples; The hyacinth letter; Apples, and In a space along a margin of a field (again, another kind of invitation, but also the place a certain rare flower was discovered--see later).
An earlier title for this book was Correspondences, which of course refers to letters, but also to relations, connections made through relationships, through exchanged language. Of course, Rachel Carson was an environmentalist, ecological researcher and lyrical celebrant of the natural world, as in books such as The Sea Around Us, so nature plays a role in these poems. We also can “correspond” through our connections with each other through our close observation of the natural world. Language is a site of correspondence--words attached to objects, actions, feelings--but also to the act of correspondence through an exchange of language.
These connections are not limited to the written word, of course; these moments of connection can take place in the shared experience of art, beauty-- the planet in all its riches--and physical connections. And through our reading texts; for instance, letters, and these poems.
Morea’s poems invite us into a world of intimacy, in the way that reading any exchange of letters might do. Secrecy. Things are unsaid, but if you read more slowly, more closely, they are nevertheless said, and revealing, in a certain way. Language, as Celan makes clear, both discloses and encloses, reveals and conceals. Expression embodies the inexpressible, as in, for instance, the legally and socially “unsanctioned” love relationships between women.
“Into a mouth/of night I slip/another/letter. This one/says take me/to your hidden/ places--trust--”
The photographer Diane Arbus wrote, "A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know." This is a common way some people think of language now, that we can’t know what language means or we can't know each other or ourselves through it. I don’t think that Morea would necessarily disagree with Arbus, though in these poems she fiercely embraces the metaphysical assumption that language can still also work the other way, too, that it can reveal.
“I am trying to tell you. On the way to the place I tried to tell you and on the way from the place I tried to tell you” but she can’t, she stops short of “actually” saying what she has actually already said in some other modality, what they both know. Language is a kind of apple that opens up to find another apple inside. It can both conceal/reveal, not say/say simultaneously.
Then of course poetry is about the revealing/concealing mechanisms of metaphor, too: ” A field/of birds is an outline of a shoulder in a room.” Words can help you see the relations, the correspondences, between things.
These relations that Morea explores happen in a kind of liminal space, along the “margin” of a field, in the shadows, in the hidden dark (and deeper richness) of night: “The water’s unseen edge,” “gradual light,” “between the paths.” The exchange of letters occurs in a site, a kind of metaphysical place, where feelings and thoughts are exchanged. The voice in corresponding language is seen as a kind of “holding” in the absence of physical touching, but it also creates actual physical and cognitive effects--desire, understanding, love.
“The world fits inside the word for it/A hand comes into/ a hand, narrating/ I see what I look like/seeing you”
“Lines of desire night blur a bird/bringing back a star’s arm”
So Morea’s poems are a kind of poetic exploration of/encounter with the ways letters work as correspondence, as language, in relationship deepening, but also how all letters (and maybe also talk, language itself, and certainly poetry) may work in and through language. It happens, Morea reminds us, in the reciprocal acts of reading and writing.
Motifs weave through Morea’s sweet poems: The color blue, stars, night, shadows, dreams. These poems are at the same time muted--a shy glance, discreet--and also exuberant, ecstatic, intimate.
One image in the last section that has metaphorical weight for the whole project of writing letters and poetry is of a “ghost flower” that was discovered “in a space along the margin of a field” in a southeastern Chicago prairie by botanist Norma Pfeiffer in 1912.
Pfeiffer collected the flower for five consecutive summers, naming it Thismia americana. It was seen each year emerging just a scant quarter of an inch above the ground, growing without photosynthesis, just a glimpse of thrilling beauty, concealed for so long, and then barely, but just enough, revealed. Like the language in a minimalist poem, just barely revealing, mostly concealed, and yet astonishing. The flower has not been seen since 2016. Is it extinct? Ask Jenn Morea (and me): No way. Searches each year continue for it, more than a hundred years later.
In thinking of the reveal/conceal conundrum in the philosophy of language I am reminded of the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was principally interested in writing about conflict that happens in dialogue, in ideological exchange, that can sometimes get resolved, even momentarily, in shared understanding. No objective knowledge exists, no complete understanding occurs forever, but participants in dialogue--in correspondence, through language--may sometimes establish a shared context through this "fusion" of their horizons. It’s the image of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, those two fingers touching, even momentarily.
So Morea seems to be saying in these poems that the fusion of horizons can happen, too, in relationships, in emotion, in love--even for moments--in part through language, through metaphor. A wonderful collection, brava, finally emerging out of the ground in time for spring here in Chicago, like a rare flower!
“A bird nests in all the trees at once.”
December 25, 2025
An absolutely beautiful book by the poet Jenn Morea. I'm so glad to see this one out in the world. I used to work with Jenn in the teaching artist world and I trust that her poems come straight from the soul.
I love how this collection centers on the profound exchange of letters between two women, how Jenn carefully researches their relationship and writes from within this frame, with the keenest observations and the leanest of lines that illuminate and shimmer with a freshness of imagery & imagination.
There's a flow and a motion to these spare poems that hold just enough to make it feel brimming but not spilling and that's the beauty of them, the way these lines do laps through the sea of one's heart center!
As a letter writing revivalist myself, I love the lines that speak specifically to the act of letter writing, like this:
"As we read or write a letter, distance moves back and forth between
us.
Closeness is a letter written in pencil and revised in ink, a letter that
guides day into place.
Love is a letter which tells of looking at a place from that place,
which tells of a place looked toward become a place looked from."
Many more beautiful, resonate lines but this was one of my favorites:
"I place the unexpected night back in its envelope then take it out to read it again."
Just wow, I love thinking of the night as a letter, one we can fold up in an envelope! There are many other loops, links and connections for the language lovers out there, this book is a beauty.
I also truly appreciate the notes on the structure of this book that appear at the end. I love the idea of a private letter folded into a more public one; I love knowing that the two women had code words for their unique form of communication! Having read the explanations & reasoning behind the names of the sections, it made me want to go back to the beginning and read them all over again for new layers of meaning & feeling!
Congratulations, Jenn!
I love how this collection centers on the profound exchange of letters between two women, how Jenn carefully researches their relationship and writes from within this frame, with the keenest observations and the leanest of lines that illuminate and shimmer with a freshness of imagery & imagination.
There's a flow and a motion to these spare poems that hold just enough to make it feel brimming but not spilling and that's the beauty of them, the way these lines do laps through the sea of one's heart center!
As a letter writing revivalist myself, I love the lines that speak specifically to the act of letter writing, like this:
"As we read or write a letter, distance moves back and forth between
us.
Closeness is a letter written in pencil and revised in ink, a letter that
guides day into place.
Love is a letter which tells of looking at a place from that place,
which tells of a place looked toward become a place looked from."
Many more beautiful, resonate lines but this was one of my favorites:
"I place the unexpected night back in its envelope then take it out to read it again."
Just wow, I love thinking of the night as a letter, one we can fold up in an envelope! There are many other loops, links and connections for the language lovers out there, this book is a beauty.
I also truly appreciate the notes on the structure of this book that appear at the end. I love the idea of a private letter folded into a more public one; I love knowing that the two women had code words for their unique form of communication! Having read the explanations & reasoning behind the names of the sections, it made me want to go back to the beginning and read them all over again for new layers of meaning & feeling!
Congratulations, Jenn!
June 7, 2025
A lovely book of poetry. I like the bit of explanation about where the book is coming from at the end, too.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews