In the process of taking its final shape, glass undergoes significant shifts, both physical and molecular, as it evolves from raw materials to the final product—whether that be a vessel, a window, or some other ubiquitous form. Similarly, the speaker in Jules Jacob’s Kingdom of Glass and Seed (2023, Lily Poetry Review Books) offers readers a glimpse of her own shifting selves, which, like the true nature of glass, are amorphous, and exist both in the world and apart from it.

What I find most remarkable in Jacob’s work, her debut full-length collection, is the control with which she renders her subject matter. From family-of-origin relationships, motherhood, illness, properties of plants and nature, child advocacy, or addiction, Jacob manages to maintain the detachment necessary to successfully build her poems as scaffolds holding up deep emotional material without sacrificing resonance to craft technique, or allowing the profoundly personal to overwhelm the reader with sentimentality. In poem after poem, Jacob consistently builds that framework, seeding the reader’s consciousness with the interconnectedness of human, plant and animal relationships.

Written in couplets and tercets, continuous verse, sonnets, and in other forms she creates, Jacob’s poems are frequently short, with many occupying 12 lines or fewer per page. But each poem packs a punch, consistently cutting, like glass, into the reader’s consciousness. 

Powerful opening and closing lines facilitate Jacob’s rendering of a world both abstract and concrete, simultaneously real and surreal.

In “Strange Birds,” an eight-line poem that opens the collection, she writes:

The bluebird that fell down my throat
I knew well. Bathed in rainlight

he trilled our names, winter’s dormant
grass and seed our bed to witness

summer’s attempt to mirror his coughed-out
feathers. Bluebird knew the magpie

that absconded with his laughter.
We choked on an ordinary Sunday.

Here, Jacob conjures a bluebird, a harbinger of happiness and hope in many cultures known for its beauty and inspiration, and turns that reputation — and perhaps a reader’s subconscious expectation — on its head by juxtaposing it with the sensation of gloom and doom. The speaker’s throat becomes an unwelcome cavity for the bluebird’s nesting; one might also speculate that the speaker is using the bluebird’s behavior as a metaphor for her own struggle with depression, or her own lost voice. But that might be too easy, and Jacob isn’t having it — your ease, that is.

As the book’s opening poem, “Strange Birds” successfully launches the reader into Jacob’s pulsing parallel reality and an ongoing theme — the fragile, yet determined lives of plants and animals, and how those lives and behaviors shape her own being.

In “The Last Kate Spade Wine Glass,” Jacob leaves the reader with fracture, breakage, and illness, but piecing together the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of the poem is less important than the cumulative sense of fragility and hopelessness. In the first of three sections:

All conceived endings
come to the same conclusion—

cleaning up shards,
the liminalist wakes to find

she’s still holding
her devoted Siamese cat,

a decade long memoir re:
replacing kids with pets.

As the consumption of alcohol and the subject of addiction both recur in several of the poems in Kingdom of Glass and Seed, one could envision Jacob’s liminalist in this poem as someone existing between two worlds, one where choice is still possible and one where choices have been made, with the results of those choices being a foregone conclusion. In the second stanza, illness is introduced:

Systemic lupus, sticky lungs
SERPENAI1 gene mutation

inherited on the long arm
of the fourteenth chromosome.

In the last section, we feel the fragility of bones and life, like glass. We also sense the tension between the speaker’s will to transcend her situation and the limitations of willpower:

faith lost in the conqueror
of all conceives an end

porous metacarpals
cupping an intact stem.

This poem juxtaposes the elegance and style of a Kate Spade wine glass with the speaker’s intimation of a messy, pre-ordained future. But while the beauty of poetry is that every reader is free to form their own interpretations of a writer’s work, Jacob’s poems speak for themselves, even as she deliberately withholds certain details that might “explain the story” of a poem better for those seeking a more straightforward narrative. With the disparate, short sections of this poem offering fragments of a life — but no explanation — Jacob allows the reader to become the liminalist, experiencing the mental space that alternates between belief and disbelief.

In “Broken Sonnet for Relapsing,” the speaker again wrestles with self-destructive tendencies and acknowledges addiction as a family affair: 

Daughters, this song is yours,
what I can’t spare us    what sinks
to the carpet keening night of stars trying
to leave this earth. Pain is the trembling
cat running to     not away, sacrificing
mirror neurons to dispel my disease.

Jacob offers the image of a trembling cat running toward, not away, as a metaphor for pain, creating a tension between fear, choice, and inevitability. By naming her fear of relapse and acknowledging the power of addiction to change and destroy lives, Jacob’s speaker gives voice to her own darkness. In so doing, however, she also fiercely claims her role as mother and protector:

Please. No more lectures on boundaries.
All mothers     can be as happy
as their troubled child.

Jacob’s compassion for troubled children belies her detached accounting in “Flight Behavior Along the I-44 Corridor,” as her speaker swoops into the life of a prostitute and imagines the girl’s knack for origami saved her, but knows better. 

Her pimp called her Birdie after paper cranes
she made from fast food napkins—
mom showed her how to fold them when she was
was ten.          Birdie wrote her real name on floppy
wings, left her tocsins in truck stop restrooms.
I want to say that’s how she was found.
Blue jay to a nest in ropey ivy vines.
I want to say her name is Olivia Quinn
Woods, one I handpicked for resilient girls.
Red flasher to a hickory      cardinal to mate.
I need to proclaim origami saved her,
but some species and lies won’t fly.

Motherhood and song appear again in “2020 Offerings,” with its observations of birds again anchoring Jacob as a celebrant of the natural world:

I was gifted a bird I’d never seen.
Russet-gold feathers, white-speckled underbelly, eyes
on the hot-pepper suet     claws, the swaying cable line.

I was gifted a quick-stepped intruder
A devotee to chain-link fences who softened
the fall of a latch. Brown thrasher     I cherish

that you’ll draw blood defending your own.
O leaf-tossing mimic, together we sing
a thousand songs as common.

The communal song Jacob gifts us in the poems of Kingdom of Glass and Seed is polyphonic, filled with complex harmonies composed of harsh undertones buffered by tender notes of grace. In “Late July, Hyw. 160,” Jacob’s speaker drives past high school baseball fields and recalls her son’s “strong seventh inning swing.” 

Missing him, I box the image
with his bubble-wrapped trophies
and drive faster than the pain.

She listens to the radio, with weather updates and news of an attack in Kabul:

New deaths, enlisted sons—
I pop a CD mix in: “Alone,”
“Pennies from Heaven”

and Tom Petty’s
“Runnin’ Down a Dream.”
We’re goin’ wherever it leads.

Jacob’s clear-eyed reckoning in the poems from Kingdom of Glass and Seed dares readers to explore physical and emotional territory both familiar and mysterious, and to absorb what they find “down ground deep,” like the mycelium she references in “Quiet Kingdom.”

In a world fragile as glass yet teeming with possibility, Jacobs’ voice resonates with the potential for forgiveness, the promise of renewal and the elusive commitment to self-love.

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