Grace Johnson has reviewed Red Ocher in the Colorado Review.
“Jessica Poli’s debut collection, Red Ocher, stirs with its reverential questioning of ritual, boundary, and expectation. … Ostensibly, the ideal audience of Red Ocher are those who are interested in the human relationship with nature, but really, this collection is for all of us who have felt, or need to feel, an ending transform into a beginning. Perhaps ultimately, Poli’s collection illustrates how a collapse can lead to an expansion, leading not to an expansion of knowing, but of the true beauty of not knowing.”
–Grace Johnson, Colorado Review, February 2025
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.