Bright Raft in the Afterweather

Jennifer Elise Foerster is completing a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver. Her works have appeared in the Oregon Literary Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Eleven Eleven, and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, she is the recipient of 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry from Stanford University.

We are adrift in mythic waters that hold the possibility of rebirth even as they float the remains of human destruction. We could be in San Francisco, within the mythos of a painter's creation, or walking a Greek island with time. Wherever we are in the poems, islands rise up of tremendous linguistic beauty, rendering hope from songs. The book is a bird flown free in the power of the winds."" - Joy Harjo""Pick this book's dark pages—befriend it—and you'll come to know Jennifer Foerster's second collection as a particularly strong chronicle of ontological strain. It's everywhere at once and also singular, very like the world it finds itself in and about. And what it enables its fortunate readers to access is not the satisfaction of so-called closure, but rather the rush and the precariousness of connection, the act, as Wallace Stevens says, ‘of finding / What will suffice.'"" - Graham Foust""Here is a language that adjusts to—is touched and changed by—the details and registers of its worlds. I think of the dilating eye, the body interpreting light, and so, scene by scene and sense by sense, becoming. In particular, Jennifer Elise Foerster's precise and gorgeously strange, original diction is a site or result of this unending shifting. This empathic, lucid work flickers with the knowledge that under this word (place) is another word (place), evoking wonder and gratitude. ‘[W]alk into the greenly singular, singing / the long sight line,' she writes, and makes me remember that to read poetry is to read more than language; it is to read a body, a place, a world."" - Aracelis Girmay""Merging the poetic with the prophetic, Foerster offers a startling vision of how to navigate this broken world and its resilient beauty."" - Rigoberto Gonzalez