Star Things

"The celestial horizons of Jess Parker's Star Things reveal a poet with a rare gift to leap between the cosmic and the quotidian. In the precise clarity of these poems, Parker's acute eye and clever comedy follow unexpected wormholes that unsettle ordinary moments as they jump between scales, finding rejected fruit in a disappointing moon as readily as she finds the complexities of time in a stack of pancakes."

- Stephen J. Burn, University of Glasgow, author of Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism

"With the varying intensity of a telescope or a microscope or the inner eye of memory, Jess L Parker zooms in and out on the negative spaces that exist between the esoteric, the mundane, and the emotional life that binds them. Each poem is 'a new datum, to be loved/as intricately as Saturn's rings are particular/up close, and held as tightly as they are.' In the dusty moonscapes of 'Star Things,' every love, every scraped knee, every abandonment, every moon is at once familiar yet alien. Through Parker's lyrical transmutation of the ordinary into the sublime, we find ourselves at home among the stars."

- Josh Burt Norman, author of Telescopes and Other People

"You'll be 'starry-eyed' reading the poems in this glittering debut by Jess L Parker, where the small loves and losses of daily life are bound to the greater 'expansion/of galaxies.' Asking, 'Could I be someone's moon?' the poet trains her telescope on the end of a romantic relationship, looking backwards through childhood, and ultimately discovering resilience like a 'glass that/shatters/itself back into shape.' With an ear for music and a flair for the occasional surprise, Parker sprinkles magic onto these pages, presenting a clear vision like a poet 'in the sky/ with a squeegee,/wiping everything/that blocks the blue.' If the stars' reflection in a pond creates a 'morse code' that communicates with the constellations, so do these poems transmit a message to the universe as they seek patterns, and therefore meaning, in the intricacies of being human in orbit among the stars, always holding close to the knowledge that 'we were moondust and will be again.'"

 - Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones

 "A powerful and original debut. Jess Parker's Star Things is a testament to the supremacy of motif over theme and proof that the lyric voice is still alive in the genre." 

-Austin Hummel, Northern Michigan University, author of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize-winning poetry collection, Poppy, and The Fugutive Kind