Jennifer Still_s lyric poetry investigates the ancestral forces and early family memories needed to form the speciation of self. Saltations suggests how we evolve into the complex spirits and personalities of our adulthood, and “where am I now” becomes a reflective mantra in living.
With textual dexterity and verbal intelligence, Still moves through prairie landscapes, flora and fauna, in intricate metaphors shrewdly worked for their resonance and harmony, and balances their weight with earthy, familiar universals of the human condition. These are poems of unmistakable quality and consistency, poems that herald a significant new poet.
-Based on the inheritance of a salt doll figurine from the poet’s late great-great grandmother, these poems are leaps of the heart, palpitations of memory that attempt to reconcile the inheritances and the losses that flow through a bloodline of generations of women . . . ” – Steven Ross Smith
