In Midnight in the Guest Room Jan Bailey locates the "bliss of the routine" experiences in women?s lives?childhood, love, marriage, sexuality, birth, child rearing, aging?and transforms them into moments of transcendent power and beauty. With uncommon wit and sensitivity she offers us poems about the pleasures of a woman?s soft and unstylish belly; the fierceness of mother love; the desolation of a miscarriage; the hilarious illusion of sexual healing; the unexpected eroticism of breast feeding:
from "Mornings in the Blue House":
She draped her newborn like a sheaf of peonies
across her lap, peeled back the blanket from
the puffball face, then parted her robe, pinched
her nipple and settled in her daughter there
and something sweetly sexual rose between
them?the pressure, the release?and she fell
fully into love, holding nothing back
as with a man, whose wounding begins
as soon as he cries Baby and rolls over.
Rooted in the landscape of the South, celebrating the private treasures to be found in the everyday world, her poems speak to us all of the joys and the losses of the seasons of our lives.
"In shapes as solid as cut stone and as brilliant as gems, Jan Bailey's Midnight in the Guest Room is powered by a headlong intensity to bring back alive what it's like to be alive. Her peoms have the confronting yet yielding power of the nude. The living one, the one the artist modeled her work on." --Jack Myers
"The voice of the poems in Midnight in the Guest Room is a woman's voice speaking in clear, strong meeasures of universal human experiences--loss and recovery, love and anger, parental joy and regret, the erotic and the contemplative, wonder and certainty. Jan Bailey's poems are a pleasure in their honesty and openness, in the art of their language, in the breadth of their vision. The gift of this book belongs to us all." --Pattiann Rogers
