A Letter to Greta by Edison Jennings
Edison Jennings lives in the western Appalachian region of Virginia. His poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies. He is the author of two other chapbooks : "Reckoning" (Jacar Press) and "Small Measures" (Wild Leek Press).
praise for Edison's book
"Yes, you should read this book for the wisdom in it. Better yet, you should sleep with it under your pillow. It’s a keening thing—formally adept and hypnotic, even, in its repetitions, Letter to Greta is an instruction manual for how to stare down death and disappointment without failing to see and appreciate “the chaotic charm” of whatever “ramshackle chapel” or “flower in the wine.” Jennings’s ability to see beyond what was to expose what is no longer—“children,” for example, “in this exhausted mountain town”—is what makes this book a kind of magic tincture for how to feel “at home in a falling world.” So, read it. I mean, drink it. Straight."
- Adrian Blevins, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award, and the Lamar York Prizefor Nonfiction; author of Appalachians Run Amok.
"Edison Jennings's poems are skillful in the ways of language, emotionally precise, and replete with beautiful grief. He distills his page to its hard-won essence, and I find myself brought back again and again to the one necessary question of all art, how to love the broken and mortal. Each of these poems is an answer in which, like'The Cats of Rome, we might learn to be 'at home in a falling world.'”
James Owens’s is the author of An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, reviews, translations, and photographs have appeared widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in The Cortland Review, Poetry Ireland, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.