Customer Reviews

Forms of Intercession

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Jayne Pupek is my kind of poet, and this is a great book, the hit of my year so far: frank in its discussion of sexuality, beautiful in its imaginings, limpid in its language. I recommend it highly.

When a book of poetry gets under my skin from the very first line--"Today I am medium rare. Don't touch me."--I know that something extraordinary is about to happen...

Forms of Intercession both entrances with Pupek's graceful use of language and keeps the reader on her toes with unexpected, intense imagery, tuning in to what lurks beneath the veneer of an ordinary life. Even the most mundane household objects take on a shimmer of both the lovely and the grotesque in these fabulous poems.

Definitely recommended!

Jayne Pupek is a word artist, her book Forms of Intercession a masterpiece filled with poems that paint images in your mind that take flight to sear your heart. She is fearless in her choice of topics and she exhibits incredible emotional bravery. From page one she has a take no prisoner; offers no apologies attitude. It is this bravery coupled with her incredible resiliency of spirit that reaches out of the page and grabs you from her very first poem, to her very last poem. In one poem Pupek writes,

Sometimes you must intercede on your own behalf.

I'm spreading tarot cards on the ground

and tossing out the ones that land upside down.

Pupek's words challenge me to go outside and toss cards in the wind, she is a writer who is in complete possession of her own wilderness and lucky for us, she is willing to share. It is this quality that will have me read again and again. Congratulations to Pupek for an outstanding debut.

"The reclining nude is absent. / Diego claims she stepped off the canvas / while he napped. I told him / how a woman needs to be treated." So it is not so much the common, the banality of this poet's relationships so much like ours, but the remarkableness of stepping out and looking back on the quotidian and saying it was like "this," specifically. Pupek frequently steps off the canvas in Forms of Intercession, and even in the most tenuous of tangential leaps into touches of Simic-like surrealities, she sustains the conceits and metaphor which bind these poems together so delectably accomplished, so excellently resolved, and beautiful crafted overall.

Pupek has a monument with this offering and it will sit on many bookshelves proudly, more often than likely open on a sofa, a side table somewhere interesting. Any intriguing stimuli around us in a room with Pupek's work stands secondary. All of the stimulating knick knacks of intellectual pleasure sit squarely in this revelatory book.

Kudos to Pupek for this most compelling work.

The poems in Jayne Pupek's haunting debut collection are technically polished, even as they confront rough material: a mother's deliberate killing of her children, a stillbirth, terminal illness. Pupek ranges comfortably from an imagined Eve in Kansas "shucking corn in high heels" to the effect of the discovery of Spalding Gray's body on someone whose own "body leans towards water." Imagery and association are surprising and sometimes startling--"Wounds open like the mouths of whores"--but always engaging. It is hard not to assume that Pupek's experience as a mental health professional has lent her compassion and skill in plumbing the depths of the psyche. Even when the speaker of a poem is "varnished in sickness," the poems themselves are robust. Gorgeous and evocative cover art by Megan Karlen complements the written work. "We dream colors/ while sleeping in the curl/ of an egg," Pupek writes. Unquiet dreams, maybe, but dreams that linger and demand attention.