The following text is Amy Marguerite’s speech from the launch of Anna Jackson’s new poetry collection, Terrier, Worrier.
I am thinking now about how to begin this speech, except I’m actually not because I have the speech all typed out and right here in my hands, but I am thinking now about how I was thinking then about how to begin this speech, I thought perhaps with a story of friendship or the particulars of a dream, but then I thought no, something else. With Terrier, Worrier, there is always something else. So I wondered and I wandered and I waited for this something else to jump out at me like a fun-sized spider, except it didn’t jump, it flew... an Eileen Myles quote flew into my head and made its nest there and I thought, of course, this is it, this is all of it... the friendship, the dream, the book, Terrier, Worrier. The quote goes like this: “The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life, not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.” Not only does Terrier, Worrier share these hopes, but it also questions, layers and even becomes them. Every section of this book is a kind of alarm clock you can love, a wakening you can look forward to, again and again.
The aliveness of this new literary sequence comes as no surprise as Anna Jackson’s writing is consistently electric; however, there is a distinctive energy about this work that sets it apart from Anna’s previous collections. This is an energy defined by its beyondness, and at the same time, it is an energy so deeply personal and affecting that even Anna’s more philosophically charged fragments resemble the rush of blood around a body. This poem in five parts is a dazzling mosaic of thought, language, philosophy, dreaming and feeling, and it is so strikingly intimate that the bodies of both writer and reader are present in the patterning—as Anna thinks, feels, searches, recollects and recalibrates, so too does the reader. This closeness is sincere, like a dream that sticks without summoning, like the touch of a foot or warm leg in the night, and it is, I think, what makes this book feel like a kind of home… it is not just a book you want to have with you always, it is also a place you want to be.
I am always wanting to be simultaneously held in place and transported by a book, to come away from it changed but not without a sense of that which has been changed. This is exactly my experience of Terrier, Worrier. Anna’s writing is gorgeously unafraid of suspension, and yet, like an artery, it is committed to forward movement, to progression. Every room is a waiting room, but every room is also an emergency room. Every fragment is a pause, but every fragment is also a critical propulsion. As the reader submerges in and emerges from this blend, they are compelled to look “anew at unnameable things, or at least things whose essence is flicker, flow”, as Maggie Nelson puts it. You cannot encounter Anna’s poetry and not find unnameable beauty in the unnameable something else, or at least in things whose essence is stillness, surge. I also have to add that you cannot encounter her poetry and not fall madly in love with hens!!
Terrier, Worrier digs “up something underground but still alive” and then handles it with the utmost care and enthusiasm. The treasure this book delivers to the surface isn’t polished in haste and locked away like some sort of divine evidence; instead, it’s left in its rugged, strange and beautifully untameable state, a state which not only assures but also amplifies its trustworthiness. This treasure is “a toothbrush with teeth instead of bristles” and “a life that takes place in the dreams of other people.” It gives rise to the kind of question that can only be answered with another question, and to the kind of answer that points the other way. Somewhere else. With Terrier, Worrier, there is always somewhere else.
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About Terrier, Worrier.
About Amy Marguerite.