Daywork

Reviews / Votes

Praise for Daywork




"[Daywork is] poetry as bracingly lyric as it is refreshing. [. . .] This is the voice of poetry: the voice of a beloved speaking beside you."-Jesse Nathan, Poetry Society of America





"The fine poems of Daywork are, in the tracework they invite, in their persistent awareness of these edges, constantly revealing."-West Branch Review




"How stunning this book of poems-exquisitely intimate, philosophical, meticulous, and sensual. Daywork seems to be salvaged from an inner depth, as though written through a mythically long night. Its sensing, gleaming syntax is at once steadfast and veering. I am astonished by the darkness and the candle (both) of Fisher's gorgeous, singular mind."-Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

"In lyric meditations that dwell as much in grief as on the work of art-from Michelangelo and Raphael to Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Nevelson-Jessica Fisher refutes the underlying violence of everyday life with parables that tell of the 'deathlessness of art, the ancient / stories once more transformed-.' Her horizon is as vast as a fresco wall, even if the world can only be measured in what a day can encompass in lines akin to shadows cast from a hundred sources of light. These stunning poems seek to remember what it was like to be a 'wire once, conductive, mute,' compelled to make it 'matter that we were here at the same time, late capital post-industrial.' The profound tenors of Daywork so ebb and intensify as to unite the sonic and philosophical registers of intimacy; the understanding that because 'everything was / saying goodbye, that I / should listen more closely.'"-Roberto Tejada, author of Why the Assembly Disbanded

"What are the poet's responsibilities in regards to witnessing and rendering violence? Arriving, like all of us, in the middle of history, Fisher's speaker reaches toward the fresco and other forms of art in search, if not of answers, then of language that is alive enough to survive its encounters with grief. It is precisely Fisher's masterful command over the line that allows Daywork to revel in unruliness and to confront, one frame at a time, the beauty and uncertainty of 'what it is to be alive now.'"-Franny Choi, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Praise for Jessica Fisher

"Poetry's distinction as a form centers on its capacity to mesmerize and haunt. Jessica Fisher's extraordinary poems possess these qualities to a rare degree. She is, simultaneously, a fastidious, discriminating intelligence and a seer, a spell maker; her poems are, quite simply, among the most memorable poems of her generation."-Judge's citation for the Rome Fellowship in Literature, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters

"Her poems are analytic meditations, their variety and beauty manifestations of extraordinary sensitivity to English syntax."-Louise Glueck, author of The Wild Iris

Praise for Inmost


"What strikes me most profoundly, reading Fisher's beautiful, formally experimental second book in tandem with Bogan's Dark Summer, is how much the idea and fact of the mother-the absent mother, the longed-for mother, the admired mother, the terrified and terrifying mother, the loving mother-stalks the work of both women."-Lisa Russ Spaar, LA Review of Books

"Fisher is a writer of rare agility and grace. Her poems often move through ideas, form, and language with a singular restrained gesture. It is through these gestures that she manages to find something like a balance to the conflicts deeply rooted in Inmost. 'We say mortar both for the shell and what it struck, brick & or stone &.' Language is the site of her exploration, the gauzey space where the daughter becomes a mother, or where the body gives birth. It is a place of multiple meanings, and so of course a place of puns, 'Immanent or emanant.' It is the way we move through thought and the way our movement is restricted. 'A month or a region, something you pass through. The roads on either side impassable, otherwise of course one would have chosen a different route.' And it is in that movement that Fisher stays, not arriving or departing but seeing what happens if the language is taken for all its meanings. It is a dangerous place to be, and it is where we are."-T Fleischmann, Rumpus

Praise for Frail-Craft

"Reading Jessica Fisher's first collection of poetry is like wandering through a garden of forking paths that at times give suddenly, astonishingly, onto the sea. . . . Extraordinary. . . . These poems are reminders of how great a burden their frail craft can bear."-Boston Review