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Jessica Poli, a finalist for the 2023 Miller William Poetry Prize for her collection Red Ocher, was interviewed at COMP: an interdisciplinary journal.
COMP: Congratulations on the publication of Red Ocher (The University of Arkansas Press, 2023), finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize! It’s an astonishing, memorable, much-anticipated debut. Would you mind telling our readers, in a few words, what the book is about?
Jessica Poli: Thank you so much! I don’t like to define “aboutness” as an author because I’m more interested in the reader’s answer to that question. But here’s a small and incomplete list of things that are in the book: unrequited love, the messiness of desire, love and loss in the caretaking of animals, slow decay, faith and the sacred, crop loss, period stains, and a bad mushroom trip.
Read the full interview at COMP.
In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.
Jessica Poli is the author of four chapbooks and coeditor of the collection More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser. Originally from Pennsylvania, Poli is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.