Dark Acre

Author: Canese Jarboe

Publisher: Willow Springs Books (2018)

"Now and then; if you read long enough and widely enough, you run into a poet who isn’t like any other, who has taken in wide-ranging traditions and strategies and turned them to their own, who manages language, form, structure, space, and even silence, in order to create in the reader something never experienced before. Canese Jarboe is such a poet. Skilled fearless, absolutely honest, deeply compassionate, deftly experimental, and supremely powerful. Enter Dark Acre with your eyes and ears wide open. Prepare to be instructed, delighted, wounded, and, most of all, astonished."  

–Robert Wrigley

"Dark Acre deeply inhabits the haunted spaces—full of lurking predators, superheated ripening, and dizzying arrays of rumors and signals—in which young bodies become visible to themselves. As they carry us through venom, fireworks, skulls and taxidermied flight, Canese Jarboe witches and bedazzles, reminds us that poetry really can be exhilarating pleasure."  

–Mary Szybist

"Canese Jarboe’s poems carry a self into existence. They tie the natural world into a slip-knot. There is no way these poems settle, but they are a settlement—a singular world. From its first gesture in Morse code to its flashes of biography to its incantations and final instructions for survival, Canese Jarboe’s Dark Acre is full of hexes and truth, and so well built. Jarboe is both magician and musician, truly a poet to follow."  

–Kerrin McCadden

"Canese Jarboe’s talents are prodigious and seemingly unlimited. Ghost-haunted and humming with mystery and myth-making, Dark Acre is a terrifying and unflinching examination of place and self. These poems drift to the very edge, and they don’t think twice about taking us with them."  

–Michael McGriff