Whenever I read a Janice Lee book, I always become conscious of form and structure. In this way, she’s a writer’s writer or a poet’s poet in that she provides a full, satisfactory experience to readers who happen to be writers. Her new--and, hard to believe, debut--poetry collection, SEPARATION ANXIETY, provides this consistent pleasure. Specifically, I am reminded how even in a poetics world where anything/everything is poetry, there can be difference(s) between prose and poem. In the latter, the caesuras—visible and invisible—are more heightened (as they should be) to maximize reader engagement between each word and/or line: if there is to be didacticism, leave that to prose. This also is an achievement given what both her prose and poems share: a philosophical bent that entails discourse.
In addition, to finish reading SEPARATION ANXIETY is to realize that Janice Lee accomplished what the best poetry collections achieve: what Lorna Dee Cervantes calls “the final poem” through the coming together of viably-individual poems. All of the poems, together, create a larger sum in the sense that 1 + 1 equals not just 2 but 11 (the visual here being a metaphor of other layers beyond the literary). Here are example poems below from her book that, individually, provide pleasure and yet also collaborate with other poems to form a book that on its own is structured as one poem.
Bonus shots of my kitten Addie enjoying the book under the warmth of a winter sun.
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