Jean Day

Jean Day has been an admired presence in the poetry avant-garde landscape for decades. In 1988, her first Roof title heralded the arrival of a scrappy initiate to the scene, A Young Recruit. Now Day is at the top of her game, becoming a "Secret Agent,” sweeping across the US on a noir-tinged cross-country road trip. We all feel that “ The bomb went off a little too soon” and are left contemplating the rubble. In lieu of a clear itinerary, the poems offer instances of shimmer in the continuous present. Threads of story, macro and mini, form the warp for the book's overall texture. The sound of resistance, the urgency of movement, and the flowering of detail are the book's matter and material. Lyric is its shape.

Maria Bowring (1817-1899) was the daughter of Sir John Bowring and his first wife, also called Maria. This story goes through Maria's life, as if she were writing it in a diary, and encompasses such things as her time in a convent, being poisoned, being shipwrecked, and having many of her beloved family members die. It is based on newspaper articles and books about her father, as well as letters from the various children to and from their parents. Some of the details in the book are historical fiction.

Poetry. LATE HUMAN is a collection of tragi-comic poems on lateness, belatedness, Weltschmerz, and borrowing (with a nod to Ernest Mandel's 1975 tome on the twilight of capitalism). The human of the title is multiple, personal, and drenched in the tears of the 21st century. Cracked children's rhymes lead onto an ethnography that takes Helen Mirren's first film appearance as seriously as Moby Dick. At the volume's center, three laments honor the realism / that would send anyone to spasm, a sentiment that crests in the book's title poem before alighting, provisionally, in Early Bird--its dawn chorus.

Mark Day was a mining engineer. He spent many years in charge of a tin mine in lower Burma. This is a fictionalised account of some his wife, Gwenllian's life in 1935, based on a diary and photos.

Mark and Gwenllian Day went from England to British Colombia with the hope of having some success in gold mining. They joined Mark's sister, Una Richmond and her husband Dick, who had gone out a few months earlier, and had got involved in market gardening. Also in on the adventure were Mrs. Caroline Day, Mark and Una's recently widowed mother, and Una and Dick's son, Peter.

Carolina is a young woman, beautiful and determined, of Spanish and French descent, living in Mexico during the Revolution. Politics plays a decisive role in her life and her family, but it is love that will direct the course of Carolina's life. Love, that manifests itself in may forms - filial, maternal and, especially, romantic - gives meaning to life in a world that can be cruel and unjust. Carolina finds herself in situations that appear to offer no way out. Her inner strength, and the abundant love integral to her character are tested to the very limit, but are not easily conquered. Her destiny carries her from her birthplace to Mexico City and finally, to Los Angeles, California. After so many experiences, so much disillusionment, and so much sadness: will she ever capture the happiness and peace that she longs for?

An early work from Bay Area poet Jean Day, addressing her entrance into the world of the avant-garde in the heroic era of Language poetry.