Beauties on Mad River

Beauties on Mad River collects together fifteen years of poetry that has appeared in three Signal Editions: The Fabulous Disguise of Ourselves , South of the Tudo Bem Café [1990], and What Dante Did With Loss [1994]. This is poetry that, in the words of George Elliot Clarke, “maps not so much the world as the soul.” Almost half the poems in this volume are new – many of the ‘keystone’ poems inspired by the spirit of the eastern lyric form, the ghazal.

“Through the medium of the keystone poems, I perceive more clearly now, and in ways that I did not previously, the themes of individual earlier pieces… These ‘plateau’ pieces have functioned for me as true keystones, as revelatory glimpses back into my work of the last fifteen years.” -Jan Conn

“What Dante Did With Loss is beautiful both for its simplicity of expression and emotional complexity.” -rob mclennan “I am partial to Jan Conn’s society and landscapes.” -Joe Rosenblatt

Reviews

“Conn’s poetry tends to take a hard objective viewpoint… Her scholarship… is remarkable and gives a richness to her work that makes her poetry map ‘not so much the world as the soul’ as George Elliot Clarke has said.” –Joanna M. Weston, The Danforth Review

“Quite a meaty collection…Jan Conn has always been one of my favorite Vehicule published poets, for the use of more narrative forms in unnarrative, thoughtful and emotional ways, and in the strength of her clarity…clear in what is hidden.” –rob mclennan, The Danforth Review

“These smart and thoughtful poems (over half of them new) drift like swamp fog between love and death, and reveal the sad folly of investing fully in eros or thanatos. Conn’s lyric and peripatetic poems are restless; this poetry no longer believes in the geographical cure. The lush botanical imagery glosses over disappointment, and suggests that admiration of vibrant beauty always leads back to personal unease, an inability to stave off anxiety or chronic insomnia.” –Tanis MacDonald, Monday Magazine