One Throne – poems – Rae Hoffman Jager

One Throne
poems by Rae Hoffman Jager
Five Oaks Press, 2017

Because it isn’t uncommon to mistake
an inkling for an omen.– {from} One Answer, and Making the Best of It

Rae Hoffman Jager, in her book One Throne, employs a lyric of transformative repetition. Answer knows nothing but its double and humor enters the ache trade armed with loneliness. After reading, I felt I’d eaten the doll out of house and home and that perhaps absence could indeed make heads or tails of being upside down. Which is to say I felt optimistically worried and deeply momentary. Jager is a priestess of distraction, and distraction, here, is the key to being present.

so think of this instead, dear—-
The ocean is so violent. – {from} First Loss

These are poems populated with cameo and propped up with a singular crookedness. Poems in which a young person, made anxious by the song of an owl, seeks both call and response from the reader, you, who will then admit quietly to yourself that you need help watching television. Poems that are awake and/or/and summoned.

So I guess we spent all this time looking for a map. I don’t know what to mourn. As for Jager’s resuscitations of the deceptively trivial- I think they tell us we matter.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
https://five-oaks-press.com/2017/04/14/one-throne-by-rae-hoffman-jager/