Jump the Clock: New & Selected Poems

by Erica Hunt

Overview

Erica Hunt writes at the intersection of poetry and emancipatory politics—racial and gender justice, feminist ethics, and participatory democracy—showing us that altering our reading strategies frames our experiences. Ultimately, she finds that words matter, savoring the small ones: articles, pronouns, collective, plural and singular. This collection brings together out of print works and journals of the same period, to speak across “crumpled” time, the past seen from then to now.

2021 Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards Poetry nominee!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643620244
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	708,050
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Erica Hunt is a poet, and essayist, author of Local History and Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree, and Conjunctions. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of an anthology of Letters to the Future: Writing by Black Women (Kore Press). Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy.

Table of Contents

Local History

Preface 3

In the Corner of the Eye 5

A Coronary Artist 6

The Order of the Story I 8

Gloss (a catalog of feeling) 10

The Order of the Story II 12

Local History (cold war breaks) 14

City 18

Household tips 23

Open door 24

Correspondence Theory 27

Surplus Landmarks (Union Square Blues) 47

Surplus Future Imperfect 48

Surplus 49

Verse 50

The net 52

Woman, with Wings 54

Afterword 56

Piece Logic

House of Broken Things 59

Time management 65

Object Authority 66

Administering the Atomic Kindom 69

Invisible Hands 71

Proof 73

Household Gods 74

High Anxiety 76

Tin Gods 77

Arcade

First words 81

Coronary Artist (2) 83

Coronary Artist (3) 84

Magritte's Black Flag 85

Starting with A 86

Arcade 87

The voice of no 89

Science of the Concrete 90

Fortune 93

Personal 94

Madame Narcissist 95

So sex, the throne whose abrasions we crave 97

After Baudelaire's "The Muse for Hire" 98

Biographical Suite 101

Body language 104

A Day and its Approximates

Reader we were meant to meet 109

Fool for love 110

If not for the comma 112

This is no time for nail biting 114

From a Handbook of Quarrels 115

This is where love comes in 116

Octavio Paz's calendar 117

Time Slips Right Before the Eyes

The Massacre of Rocks 121

Mood Librarian-a poem in koan 125

Time Slips Right Before the Eyes 133

Chapter 1 Home 134

Chapter 2 (Back) Home 135

Chapter 3 An Old Home 137

Chapter 4 Going Home 138

The Awful Truth 142

For Fern 143

Should You Find Me 145

Love's 147

Veronica: A Suite in X Parts

Veer iconic 151

"Someone matching your description" 152

Ghost Names 155

Veronica 157

Suspicious activity 161

Upon another acquittal (a choreography of grief) 163

Mourning Birds 165

After a dream deferred 167

Soft Assault 168

Body Double 170

What could go wrong? 172

Broken English 173

On occasion, we produce history, the present's surprise 177

Sorrow Songs 178

Instructions for Waking 182

Instructions for the next chapter 183

Instructions for travel over land (pandemic version) 184

Context is all 185

Fr** dom 186

This is where love comes in 187

The back of the future 188

Lines on Love's (Loss) 190

Wavering: adios, vamos, scat 192

Author's Note & Acknowledgments 193

Editorial Reviews

"Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock is eerily appropriate for a time when a pandemic has suspended the normal temporal rhythms for so many of us, while laying bare our mortally uneven relationship to those rhythms."—The New York Review of Books

"If it doesn’t pay to be an individual, what else is there to be? We may not be able to answer that question 'until we enlist sense to illumination and make room for the blanks.' That line comes from Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, a sometimes brutal, always brilliant tour of Western individualism’s social and ecological effects.—Boston Review

"In 1994 I wrote about Erica Hunt’s first book, Local History, for the Village Voice. In that review I praised an “insistently high level of self-consciousness” that “pressurizes ordinary perceptions until some small truth that tells on the poet bursts forth.” Almost three decades and several books later, her intensity of utterance continues to produce a verse that springs revelations from the commonplace. Containing selections from all of her books and additional unpublished material, this volume testifies to a sustained vision and the development of a language that veers from the personal to the abstract so smoothly you can’t quite tell the difference."—Hyperallergic

"With a hand over her heart, Hunt leads us by love deeper into our attention to the present, wherein past and future teeter on our tongues, waiting to see just what we are really ready to do."—Jacket2

"We have lived in one chronology for many decades, of disrepair, divisions and fears. In response, Erica Hunt’s is a full-fronted other way of naming. In every detail and crevasse, her work unmutes voices and refigures necessary community... Hunt is crucial to an analytic poetry engaging in this work."—Restless Messengers

"Here, and elsewhere, the poet models how to speak directly, honestly, and without foregoing complexity. She observes and speaks of body language and grief, love and justice, in scenes that feel at once surreal and hyperreal. Reinventing itself at every turn, Jump the Clock is a master class in attention and engagement."—Poets & Writers, Ten Questions

"This collection of Erica Hunt’s poetry might just save you. Including out of print works and others, this volume is one of inspiration, resistance and possibility."—Ms. Mag

"Erica Hunt has been publishing poems since the 1980s. Jump the Clock gathers nearly two hundred pages’ worth of them. I generally feel like a poet has some level of talent if, in a chapbook, I find a couple of lines I want to quote; Hunt’s book had me nodding or laughing or wincing in appreciation at least every other page. I emerged from it with the sense that she is, whatever this term might mean, a major poet."—Plough

“Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, an invaluable gathering of pioneering poet, theorist, teacher, and activist Erica Hunt’s poetic oeuvre, is a treasure of lyric and analytic revelations and delights. A key figure in the Language Poetry movement, a pacesetter in late 20th and 21st century women’s writing, and a lodestar for Black innovative writers, Hunt in this collection expands poetry’s range and power and shows how to make the illegible legible. Or as she incomparably reminds us, 'What we do not dream we cannot manufacture.'”—John Keene

"Let’s begin with the obvious: Jump the Clock is a significant collection of poetry. Erica Hunt’s poetry is, among other things, the study of being present and of being’s presence across time. Exploring histories of a family, of modes of thinking, of the griefs of Black mothers and women, of a neighborhood, it is poetry lit through by the power of thought’s potential, through language, to tear open new possibilities of experience. This work keeps nonstandard time and calls standard forms and time into question. This is poetry’s power. Opening with a thought in motion—'I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what we say about what we feel,' we learn that we need to 'watch what we say' in order to understand our saying and in order to take care of each other and care of our own unruly selves. We need this poetry at this moment. Serious and illuminating language-play animates decades of brilliant work that rends and renders singular and communal selves. Hunt has written poetry that is 'an exclamation/[that should be] felt all over the planet.'”—Tonya Foster

"Like an afternoon of sunshine to plan an uprising, I couldn’t enjoy Jump the Clock in any way except slowly. In these selected poems by Erica Hunt, one finds poetry between names and their definitions, a poetry of ongoingness to spread past the lines. These poems are embodied. They are meant to be savored and thought with the heart and the mind; they exist in our world. Clear-eyed in their disobedience, cerebral as well as tender, they gently encourage poetry as practice for a new one. The orderings of things are twisted up, seen from above, '[until] / balance is fulfilled by the barely contiguous unfamiliar,' but the disorientations are for getting to language and subjects 'in the corner of the eye.' Well-known for her commitments to the political in her writing and life, we’re so lucky to have Hunt’s poems in one volume. She reminds us to survive and redefine. She continues to teach us how to jump on our own timelines."—Yanyi

From the Publisher