Scapes

Author: Jessica Grim

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing (2024)

In Scapes, Jessica Grim presents a familiar world of weather, geography, pleasure,danger, and daily life in language so exuberant and thoughtful that the reader’s own experience is transformed, line by line, word by word, until they find they are“trafficking in wildness and a/coastal anticipation”. This “tender attempt at vocalization” succeeds by using a subjective, intimate lens to reveal a “swift grammar of the outside”, an objective sense of stillness and minute observation that is satisfying and true. Grim shapes her experience—of escapes to new places and of the intense yet quotidian reality of landlocked life—into a verbal version of the sublime. Scapes is a spare, understated, elegant, original, and elegant book about experience and it is a joyful experience to read.
Laura Moriarty

This is a book built of wide and wide-open horizons, and not just those evoked by the content, but also linguistic horizons—exacting, unexpected word choices and combinations—and sonic horizons composed of interlocking sound chains that stretch across the work. It’s a book that’s entirely outside, taking us out into the world and letting us expand with it until we become it. Full of fresh air and frank vision, it’s a marvelously liberating read.
Cole Swenson

Jessica’s poetry is one of everyday, habitual encounter rendering all that she perceives relationally wondrous, activating grammars of animacy, dramatizing the scenes of a shifting and situated embodiment. Scapes feels like watching the “natural world”—and one’s watching of that world in words—unfold, tenderly releasing landscape from its aesthetic-prosodic enclosures (“nature poetry,” “landscape painting”) while quietly grieving ongoing ecocide. Ecopoetry is too reductive a term for this gorgeous, subtle, holosensual world building Jessica continues to gift to us.
Thom Donova