Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, and many other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and edits Pleiades: Literature in Context.
Jenny Molberg has reinvented the confessional poem as a heroine's
journey. A poet in the Orphic tradition, she journeys into the
Underworld to rescue her speakers, her Penelope, her Ophelia, her
battered and accused and underestimated and gaslighted Eurydices.
She brings them line-by-exquisite-line back to the world of the
living. She's nobody's fool and she knows what's at stake-- Molberg
burns her Demogorgon Prince of Hell to the ground and every corner
of his kingdom with him. In Refusal, she writes a world where her
speakers become free to look back or forward or cast their gaze in
any dark corner that could use a little light.--Kathryn
Nuernberger, author of Rue
Jenny Molberg's Refusal is a book that maps the difficult journey
to the top of the head, the chakra of ushering light: 'Remember
them, ' she writes of those who 'will empty/their cups so you can
drink.' 'Remember them, too, ' she writes of the abusers and
takers, indicted in the speaker's deft acts of resurfacing and
witness. 'Now let them go.' The brilliant index around which these
poems spin is the image of the hospital for our previously
undiagnosed wounds of the mind and spirit. In a book she dedicates
to 'all writers of unsent letters, ' Molberg issues her own
epistles to the world, sent off from these narrow beds that stand
between obsession and freedom, trauma and resilience, memory and
letting go. It is there her work sparkles: 'Self Portrait as
Nothing, ' 'The Poet, ' 'The Night I Left, ' 'The Spirit Change, '
and 'Vise' are masterful, and Refusal establishes her as one of the
leading poets of her generation.--David Keplinger, author of
Another City, winner of the 2019 Rilke Prize
The gorgeous, seeking, brave, raging, restorative poems of Jenny
Molberg's Refusal unite the reality of present traumas with figures
from literary history. Here, Penelope imagines Odysseus killing her
pets in a fit of love, Ophelia rolls a 20-sided die, the demogorgon
attends a writer's conference, and God sets out a tea party in a
forest. In these poems, imagination is an act of healing, creating
hospitals to cure what our culture doesn't make space for. The
poems contend with desire's insidious urge for possession and the
dangerous attraction between forgiveness and cruelty. Molberg
teaches me the importance of women in healing--in mothers, in
friendship, in a squid as an emblematic feminist. The polyphony of
voices against abuse becomes love as coalition as collective as a
community. This book is my heart's hospital, my anthem of
refusal.--Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the
Land of Nod
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