Still Falling: Poems

by Jennifer Grotz

Overview

A searching new collection by a poet who “pays exquisite attention to everything she encounters” (The Washington Post)


Still Falling expands on Jennifer Grotz’s precise sense of craft and voice to investigate new territory in this astonishing collection. These poems are emotionally raw and introspective, exploring the profound capaciousness of grief. Grotz carefully and deftly carries the weight of losses and their aftermaths—the deaths of the poet’s mentors, friends, and mother; the endings of relationships; and the enclosures of a life spent in attendance to the world in a state of wanting rather than truly living. Here also are poems that movingly and crucially decide what dedicating one’s life to poetry might require.


But in the wake of painful loss, Grotz writes toward “this world, the living.” Her poems reveal and meditate on the paradoxical relationship between the literal and the figurative, at the heart of poetry itself, like the darkness and light of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. Still Falling is a book to be read slowly, calling readers back into the stillness of being, finding hope, “not death / where darkness and silence and dust are / only darkness and silence and dust.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644452325
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Window Left Open, The Needle, and Cusp. A professor at the University of Rochester, she directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2023

“I don’t know/ how we keep living in a world/ that never explains why,” Grotz (Window Left Open) writes in her ruminative and beautifully crafted fourth collection. Navigating love, grief, and the various losses one faces in a life, Grotz considers how “The mind won’t stop minding” as she delves into the intricate and intimate parts of the attentive self that witnesses “the stillness, the windless calm” and the “heartbreak indigo.” The poet finds solace even in the midst of confusion or the aftermath of loss. “A walk is a poem,” Grotz offers, “So is a grief.” Elsewhere, she writes beautifully on being depressed, asserting “I wasn’t indifferent, I was sinking./ I stared at nothing and heard my voice say,// just wait a little longer. I didn’t know/ which was me—the urging or the sinking.” “Earth’s the right place for love,” she declares at the end of “In Sicily.” Bestowing many moving and lyrical insights, this deserves to be read slowly and compassionately. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Still Falling, Jennifer Grotz’s fourth collection of poems, illuminates the connection between art and time.”— Sofia Tokar, The University of Rochester News Center

"You pick up a Jennifer Grotz book because you want to hear that voice again, and again. She’s making some of the finest work of our times. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, given these times, that her newest sweep of poems— Still Falling—is a cataract of grief, a cascade of elegy that is as quietly ecstatic as it is undaunted, steady, loving life as it mourns."—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"In her book’s final poem, Grotz, Director of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, quotes Robert Frost without mentioning his name. . . . Frost dismisses the question with a casually calculated—and very catchy—Yankeeism, but Grotz doesn’t take the easy exit. Instead, her poem, 'In Sicily,' like so many of the others in Still Falling, nudges at and beyond the edges of perception in language that is gratifyingly grounded in the real world."—David Starkey, California Review of Books

“Still Falling is an undeniably gorgeous book of love poems full of grief. In these pages, Jennifer Grotz writes line after line of direct statement in rhythms that would leave any reader breathless and wanting more: ‘I will call desert this kingdom that you were, / sun this loneliness. I will say / wasp to name the fear.’ I am in awe of Grotz’s power to grow and transform book after book. I cannot read Still Falling without crying.”—Jericho Brown

"Still Falling is sure to resonate for nearly all readers, as each of us carries into the collection our own losses and our own desperate need to calm."—The Poetry Question

“Bestowing many moving and lyrical insights, this deserves to be read slowly and compassionately.”—Publishers Weekly

"Coming from deep inside, these poems work by free association, often alluding to falling rain, snow, and even sunlight pouring onto a surface, all of which add a spiritual resonance to these hypnotic and meditative poems."—Diane Schraper, Library Journal

From the Publisher

04/01/2023

Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Grotz (Window Left Open) offers free verse with scatterings of alliteration and rhyme in her affecting new collection. She notes in an interview that her poems begin when "something in the world catches my eye"; then she hears a piece of music or an interior voice and combines all of these elements to create a kind of patchwork poetry. Many of the best poems in this patchwork contain biblical allusions, with one of the best, "The Conversion of Paul," connecting Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus with the death of a close friend named Paul. (A stunning close-up of Caravaggio's painting on the subject is reproduced on the book's cover.) Another poem references the Bible's well-known observation about the Virgin Mary: "She kept all These Things and Pondered Them in Her Heart," but here Grotz is the one pondering the loss of a loved one. In fact, loss figures largely in this collection, including, evidently, the loss of a mother. VERDICT Coming from deep inside, these poems work by free association, often alluding to falling rain, snow, and even sunlight pouring onto a surface, all of which add a spiritual resonance to these hypnotic and meditative poems.—Diane Scharper

Library Journal