Spilled and Gone

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of Inventing Difficulty, winner of the Gerald Cable Prize, and The Two Yvonnes, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the NEA, and of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America for the poems in Spilled and Gone. She teaches inside and outside academia, and lives in her native Brooklyn.https://poemsincommunity.org/

In Spilled and Gone, her new collection of poems, Jessica Greenbaum envisions a Brooklyn that is real and a Brooklyn that is everywhere. She achieves this by a brilliant use of metaphor: her seagulls ‘wheel like immigrating thoughts,’ and a half-moon at dawn is ‘stuck like a dime in the coin slot.’ So, too, her exuberant odes to a potato masher and a stovetop espresso maker raise those mundane objects until they rise off the page, Whatever she entertains -- a storm-struck tree, an outdoor concert, her immigrant grandparents, a food truck in Grand Army Plaza -- her subject is enlivened by keen observation, a fresh mind, and a vivid sense of place that makes me want to be there, with her, in her world.