Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them--plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript--can be found in this masterful collection of her life\'s work.
The Collected Poems of Jean Valentine will no doubt serve as an essential handbook for anyone looking to lean into the knotty questions of human existence..
They are gorgeous wonders and curiosities that bring us a new kind of light.
Ada Limon states, The extraordinary Poems of Jean Valentine have often existed in the between spaces, the caves, the secret rooms of the mind.
The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet.
Old life, / I\'m glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found, / I was written on a wall in air.
A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: This is happiness.
Love doesn\'t disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries.
Guides are everywhere as she is leaving all worlds behind.
Spirits connect.
Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry.
In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states.
It was Jean\'s wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books--back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle.
Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health.
Even Jean\'s therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions--a poem that can be found in this new work.
In her later years, Jean would write Poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn\'t be lost.
The Poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth.
The new Poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind.
Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them--plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript--can be found in this masterful collection of her life\'s work
