Where can we read some of your recent work?
“Large Glass: The Bride’s Erotic Selfies and the Sum Over Histories” Quarterly West 2019
“Touch:” DIAGRAM 2019
“Resemblance” and “In the Presence of Western White” Omniverse 2019
“Whose Form Is Delocalized” Inverted Syntax 2019
“Woolsthorpe in the Mythical Annus Mirabilis” PANK 2019
“Materialism, Exhibit 42: Woodpecker and Ash Borer” Exposition Review 2019
World, Composed (chapbook, Finishing Line Press)
What are you reading right now?
In no particular order: M.L. Martin’s inventive translations of Wulf and Eadwacer. I thought Khadijah Queen’s I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On was fearless and necessary, and I’m loving her innovation in Fearful Beloved and her play, Non-Sequitur. Margaret Ronda’s For Hunger. Ely Shipley’s Some Animal. Lara Candland’s The Lapidary’s Nosegay. Ewa Chrusciel’s Strata. Forrest Gander’s Be With. Adrian Matejka’s Map to the Stars. Emily Koehn’s prose poems are exciting. C.D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade is a feat of docu- and eco-poetics—I love the layering in it.
Always-reading: Reginald Shepherd, Brenda Hillman, Rae Armantrout, Jorie Graham.
Everything Rachel Carson wrote about water—so far, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland—just wow, so good. All of Elizabeth Kolbert’s environmental writing, in The New Yorker and The Sixth Extinction. I like Annaka Harris’s writing on consciousness and AI—her essays can be found in Nautilus and she has a book called Conscious. Susan Neville’s Fabrication is a great meditation on making and made things.
Finally, I find the incomparable George Saunders especially comforting during the pandemic—I keep revisiting Lincoln in the Bardo, but the short fiction too: Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Tenth of December, etc. I bliss out on the audiobooks when I need to escape this horrific reality—it’s his voice reading, and he writes and records the musical interludes. (Plus the audiobook for Lincoln has an all-star cast and rewards multiple listens.)
What’s next for you? (Anything you’d like to promote!)
I’m thrilled to announce that I will have a poem in the August issue of Scientific American.
Website & social:
@jreedscipoet (Twitter)
@jreed93523 (Instagram)
https://www.facebook.com/jessica.reed2
Jessica Reed’s chapbook, World, Composed (Finishing Line Press), was a finalist for the Etchings Press Whirling Prize. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Quarterly West, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Inverted Syntax, North American Review, Bellingham Review, New American Writing, Exposition Review, The Fourth River, DIAGRAM, Pank, and elsewhere.
