Description
Jill Osier, winner of the 2017 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, returns to Bull City Press with a new chapbook.
“These poems shine with the deep intelligence of gentleness and of a quiet, sustained concern. To read them is to be reminded of Robert Creeley’s passionate advocacy of Hart Crane, a passion that reached crescendo in the exclamation (in a letter to Charles Olson) “Dammit, isn’t that gentle!” Here is a poet whose primary commitment is to attention, a poet who simultaneously understands and avows that attention is now and ever shall be the vivid prime of Love. I neither blush nor hesitate to say that such avowal is literally angelic. This poet’s “Requiem” gently but unequivocally proposes point-of-view as an angelic imperative, gentle on its very face: “Try / to remember the smell of sun through it all. It’s / a rare courtship.” Love courts attention, and attention in return is both courted and empowered by love. The upshot? “There was a beating / of silence then, until it was a new quiet…” It is the bright substance of this “new quiet” I am happy to welcome and to acknowledge. It is surely the peaceable frontier of joy.”
—Donald Revell
Jill Osier
Jill Osier’s first full-length book of poems, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, was selected by Carl Phillips for the 2019 Yale Younger Poets Prize and received the 2020 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. She is also the author of the chapbooks from (Bull City Press, 2018), Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (Bull City Press, 2013), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and Bedful of Nebraskas (sunnyoutside, 2012). Honors for her work include the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
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