The Sealey Challenge, Day Four: Beautiful Zero by Jennifer Willoughby

 

I knew that Milkweed is a great press, but I had never heard of Jennifer Willoughby. This book won the 2015 Lindquist and Vennum Prize in Poetry, and it is a collection of delightfully quirky and thought-provoking poems. Over and over again, Willoughby takes two incongruous ideas or things and joins them in an even more surprising metaphor.  From "We Work the Dark Like the Moon": "Hey, maybe we're just / another type of firmament pocked / with pulsing stars and the cotton lungs / of galaxies gone wild." Also, from "The Sun is Still a Part of Me": "There is / so much violence in reconstruction. / Each minute is grisly, but I have / to participate. I am building / what I cannot break."

From "The Properties of Women are the Properties of Life":

Do we inegest chemicals? Yes, we wrestle our feelings

into flammable capes. Do we enter and leave our feelings?

Yes, we wear young antlers to confuse hunters. Do we

represent disaster? Yes, it smells lie sulfur after we rain.

Her 10 Kaiser Variations are also amazing. This is a book to re-read, and to read when one wants to spark one's own creativity.