In "House of Poured-Out Waters", Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency. More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future - but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her. Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.

House of Poured-Out Waters: Poems (Illinois Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Mead, Jane

Poetry

University of Illinois Press

In House of Poured-Out Waters, Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency. More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future--but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her. Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.

HOUSE OF POURED OUT WATERS: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series)

Acts of Faith is an anthology of short fiction that illuminates the question: "What is faith?" Stories by such authors as Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Raymond Carver, and Richard Bausch offer examples of what faith can be. Faith is different from belief, belief in God or in a set of orthodox opinions. Faith is used here in the sense of trust in something that cannot be explained logically. It is that leap in the dark - Abraham's willingness to follow God's command - with an outcome that cannot be known until it is attained. When certain characters in Acts of Faith dispel their doubts and follow their feelings, their worlds expand to include a comprehension at which logical reasoning can only guess.

Acts of Faith

Religion & Spirituality

Timken Pub

Jane Mead was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College, and in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, In 1991, State Street Press published her long poem "A Truck Marked Flammable" as a chapbook. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers' Award. "Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

The Lord And The General Din Of The World: Poems

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

Sarabande Books

Jane Mead was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College, and in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, In 1991, State Street Press published her long poem "A Truck Marked Flammable" as a chapbook. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers' Award.
 "Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review
"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi
"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review
"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal
"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review
"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

The Lord and the General Din of the World

These lyric elegies, spoken by the under-self,” become a series of subtle chants which sing the speaker into being both physically and spiritually, and through which Mead seeks solace, enlightenment, and joy in the cycles of life and death in the natural world.

The Usable Field

Alice James Books

"It's a beautiful, seamless book that never stops gathering force—one in which the strength, brilliance, and movement of the phrase is the ultimate ecosystem."—Cole Swensen
"I feel utterly transported in Mead's presence, surrounded by—and imbued in—her language."—Nick Flynn
A striking combination of the spiritual and political, Money Money Money | Water Water Water explores the enormous impact that widespread environmental destruction makes on our way of life. With prophetic disquietude, Jane Mead's inquiry into the interconnectedness of our choices exposes our existence as paradox. Her poems beseech us to consider the consequences of our collective actions on the planet.
Cove, *****
I came out of the dark hills and the dark hills own me. I have no patience for the sticky-minded
stratums. The concern of the comfortable for the comfortable makes me sick. Meanwhile, the red leaves spin on their axes of air,
different leaves now, different axes, same big death. And wouldn't we love to shrug now and just say sorry?
Apparently not say sorry. Let's not talk about it. I wish I lived in an opium cloud.
Jane Mead is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently The Usable Field, also from Alice James Books. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Lannan foundations. For many years poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University, she now farms in northern California and teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in poetry and poetry in translation.

Money Money Money Water Water Water

On the National Book Award Longlist for Poetry 2016 "World of Made and Unmade is a deep blue yarn of very fine thread. We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead’s poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacan waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up." C.D. Wright
Jane Mead's fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We're drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.
 This year I have disappeared from the harvest routine
the pickers throwing their trays under the vines, grape hooks flying, the heavy bunches flying
pickers running to the running tractors with trays held high above their heads and the arc of dark fruit 
falling heavily into the half-ton bins.
The hornets swarming in the diesel-filled air.
Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently MONEY MONEY MONEY / WATER WATER WATER (2014). Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she's the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.

World of Made and Unmade

This massive collection houses Mead’s life’s work: seven books spanning twenty-seven years. Follow chronologically through decades and become captivated by heartfelt muses on loss, madness, danger, grief, isolation, and self-identity. Her poems explore spaces we often try to ignore and finds a comfortable middleground. Mead candidly and openly weaves together pain and joy until it meshes into glimpses of humanity.

To the Wren: Collected & New Poems

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