Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Eric Selland on Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Hers is a radically open form - a framework through which the data of life, and poetic themes and materials, freely migrate. She does not reject the personal, but she does not privilege it either. It is simply part of the data. It has been four years since Joritz-Nakagawa's highly acclaimed 2020 collection, Plan B Audio (Isobar, 2020, including photography by Susan Laura Sullivan). In her new book, Luna, the "data of life" include such things as the coronavirus, the wars in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, cruelty to animals, environmental destruction, and disability, among others. Although the terrain is often dark, there is hope in the form of interconnectivity and empathy: "another's loss / becomes / your own" and for some spirituality found in the natural world.

Excerpts from Plan B Audio, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's new book-length poem, were published in Poems: New & Selected (Isobar Press, 2018); here is the complete work. The book was written during, and in response to, a life-threatening encounter with illness, and in the aftermath of the radical surgery that saved the author's life. This is not, however, a documentary or an autobiographical work, but rather an extraordinary book-length collage of lyrics, phantasmagoric narratives, beautifully honed language work (and play), lament, mourning, fables, demented quests, chronicles of out-of-kilter hospital routine, fierce humour, sadness, anger, love, pain, loss, and survival. It is a work of enormous formal variety, full of powerfully focused writing. The book is illustrated with a series of striking photographs by Susan Laura Sullivan.