Although the poems in Stateside are concerned with a military husband's deployment, Jehanne Dubrow's riveting collection is driven more by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration than by any overt political agenda. The speaker in these poems attempts to understand her own life through the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder, invoking Penelope's plight in The Odyssey as a model but also as a source of mystery. These poems are dazzling in their use of form, their sensual imagery, and their learnedness, possessing a level of subtlety and control rarely found in the work of a young poet. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside (Northwestern University Press, 2012 and 2010). Her first book, The Hardship Post (2009), won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, and her second collection From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Competition (2009). Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, The Promised Bride, in 2007.
Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.
She is the Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House and an assistant professor of creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
