Nancy Miller Gomez has reviewed Jessica Poli’s collection Red Ocher at Ecotheo Collective.
Throughout the book, Poli brings memories so vividly to life that they begin to feel like our own. Through rich imagery and language, she emotionally and physically embeds her poems––and her readers–– in the lush, cyclical, and sometimes destructive landscape and lifestyle of farming, a life dependent on the vicissitudes of weather, repetitive chores, and hard work. Poli’s first full-length collection is a lyrical, elegiac contemplation of loss, yearning, and unrequited love, a slow burn of a book that will lodge itself inside you as lived memory.
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.