Now out from Otoliths—The Meditations, by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

The Meditations
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
80 pages
Cover painting by Julia Wolfson
Otoliths 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-5-5
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-meditations/7491123

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Meditations beautifully combine the inward focus of reflection with the leaps and breakages of contemporary urban life — a life in which meditative stillness is elusive, if not impossible. At the meeting-point of real-world politics and poetic internality, The Meditations jump-cut between the rhetorics of capitalism and constant war (“as if the weapons were moving // entirely in the wrong direction”) and hard-won lyric flight (“horses laugh // and clouds put on their aprons”). Throughout, Joritz-Nakagawa plays with line-breaks and white space, with orthography and diacritical marks — all of which syncopate syntax and hint at the manifold meanings hidden in phonemes. Like tesserae, her words and lines create — through fragments — exquisite patterns. These are poems that “enter the language partial / and come out / whole.”
—Elisabeth A. Frost