Story

Author: Jennifer Firestone 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2019)

There is a Story at a beach. There is a couple evolving and devolving inside a new-fangled form of the couplet. There is the landscape: the ocean, sand, and sun that language flails in trying to recreate. “The beach reached for them but slipped. / The beach shells and sound. / The beach the one syllable until soft.” Story is a cryptic film, an old photograph, a mystery, where narrative, memory, truth, and trauma are interrogated, where creditability slips much like the language that is storytelling. Where, “what is the truth but what we say.”

"Jennifer Firestone, one of the most innovative (and smartest) poets of her generation, recounts the seconds of a traumatic event: like Zapruder’s home movie of the Kennedy motorcade, each second of narrative is a frame, slowed down, replayed in the aftermath of 'What happened?'"

–Brenda Coultas