Foxlogic, Fireweed

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three other poetry collections, including Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The recipient of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Pushcart Prize, she teaches at the University of Redlands in California.

"In her award-winning collection Foxlogic, Fireweed, Jennifer Sweeney draws a portrait of a life firmly rooted in its physical and spiritual realms even while it revels in the liminal spaces that can’t always be explained with logic or reason."-Donna Vorreyer, Rhino Poetry “The logic of Foxlogic, Fireweed is human and humane; it’s the logic of a penetrative tenderness and an embodiment always on the verge of dispersing into fox, or deer, or rain. . . . These are not bandwagon poems. They don’t mug for the camera. Rather, they enact a love ‘sourced in loneliness’ where ‘with our little keys of witness’ we find each other-the very definition of the lyric poem.”-Diane Seuss “In Jennifer K. Sweeney’s beautiful new collection, poems serve as altars for the fierce hearts and fairytales that center our lives. . . . These poems recognize how sacred attention can be. In Foxlogic, Fireweed nothing escapes hiding and nothing escapes love.”-Traci Brimhall “Foxlogic, Fireweed is a torn map of a state where all words are proximate to mystery. Venturing into terra incognita, into territory that might be anima mundi, maybe, reader, you think you know the lineaments, but they are altered. Altared. Yes, to dream space, but wilder, wider-this metal into bird, stone into air, mother into vulpine. Sweeney is breathing strangeness into a small body of words, and the expanses open exponentially.”-Marsha de la O “The poems in Jennifer K. Sweeney’s Foxlogic, Fireweed do the hard work of ‘remaining in the perhaps.’ Sweeney walks the many fine lines between introspection and observation, speaking plainly and singing. She finds moments of awe in the everyday, urging us to ‘keep afraid what is fearful, hold what demands to be held.’”-Grace Bauer, author of Mean/Time

• Acknowledgments    1 (whole flocks of rain)Letter from the Sound    I will break into my life for my life    Bat Milk    Poem for My Son in the Car    Outside My Window Is a Window    Crickets, Vespers    Old Town Square    The Pear Trees at TerezÍn    Altar: Compass    Alpenhorn    Wildest    2 (I am driving a whale heart)Preface        I am driving a whale heart    Wind under the Skin    Picking Up My Wedding Dress    Variation on Bear and Moon    Jennifers of the 1970s    In the House of Seals    To Remain in Perhaps    Every morning we boarded our little ship    The Somnambulist    3 (brighten the road, dear)Duet        When we were carnies    Still Life with Djembe and Black Widow    The Day Everywhere and White    Snake in the Zendo    Tree; Tremble    Cul-de-sac    The Game of Life    Landslide    Eclipse        The Snow Leopard Mother    4 (part fur part hollow)Foxlogic, Fireweed    Tinderbox    Making Use    Altar: Fairytale    A Deer Story    Still Life with Skeleton and Sight Word    Vigil        How Many Leaves and Boats Gather Together    Cabinet of Curiosities    What Turkeys Can Teach Us about Grief in Suburbia    5 (in a circular wind)bike shed will often show more results than “bike shed”    Antlers        For the brown widow who laid her eggs under my son’s bicycle seat    Altar: Aerial Heart    Pastoral    Our Laundry Room of Deflated Balloons    Meeting    Three-Handed Clock    Nacelle and Turn    Ceremony    Notes