Jean Valentine

"Jean Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book Review Quietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see. Shirt in Heaven Come upon a snapshot of secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches— come upon letters I thought I'd burned— I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs. I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat down in the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried. He yelled at the aide to get out. His two sons had been your students. —me too, little-knowing— Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

The collected works of one of America’s most innovative poets.

"As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library Journal In her eleventh collection—honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to Lucy, the earliest known hominid, the pared-down compactness of her tone and vision reveals a singular voice in American poetry. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way." From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them": At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream. * Can you breathe all right? Break the glass shout break the glass force the room break the thread Open the music behind the glass . . . Jean Valentine, a former State Poet of New York, earned a National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

"Jean Valentine has written a visionary book. If it is built with the brick and wood of this world, the light that pours through its windows is searing, healing."—Marie Howe

New poems from a National Book Award winner

Over the course of more than four decades, contemporary American poet Jean Valentine has written eleven books of stunning, spirit-inflected poetry. This collection of essays, assembled over several years by Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler, brings together twenty-six pieces on all stages of Valentine's career by a range of poets, scholars, and admirers. Valentine's poetry has long been valued for its dreamlike qualities, its touches of the personal and the political, and its mesmerizing phrasing. Valentine is a National Book Award winner and was named the State Poet of New York in 2008. She has taught a number of popular workshops and has been awarded a Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize.

Collected essays on the work of Jean Valentine

Between planning her grandparents' surprise anniversary party and her school's new Be Sweet project, there's a lot happening, but Kylie Jean is still determined to be the valentine queen!