String Parade by Jordan Stempleman

With a voice that speaks of the simultaneous desolation and burgeoning hopefulness of our time, Stempleman’s String Parade begs us to listen again to an American landscape long forgotten, yet still around.   It is a landscape full of children and families, of old Hollywood glamour, of worn out streets, of gardens, of domestic scenes full of ache, of heavy rain clouds, of dedication.   As the title suggests, images and people float at us in endless sequences, strung together in a language of the everyday.   Here in these poems, Stempleman creates a spectacle of dedication for the everyday people he loves, which by the end of the book, we realize is all of us.   And thankfully, I am, that it is so, that this poet loves me, and that I can feel his weighty love for his readers in every word.   In an American poetry, it should always be the case, that our poets love us tenderly despite all our human imperfections.

—Dorothea Lasky

Is it possible? These are like so many uncertain caresses imbued with analytic decision. How are such poems elusive, yet incursive ? Their imagistic centers oscillate, while their perceptive radii remain sure. Dissipation is here concentration. I mean: structure , made strangely not of stability, but of stunningly tender vulnerabilities. “All thinking/ makes a place that is vulnerable/ and uneasy, where understanding means/ something else.” In String Parade , Jordan Stempleman makes us feel that nothing is digression: that an apparent act of turning away – each vulnerable thought! – may in fact be an act of descending, down .

—Nicholas Manning

Jordan Stempleman holds up his window-poems, not just to look through, but also to finally examine the odd reflections such warped glass enables, “one long scream, is permissible, it says / you are okay, tired, but still willing, / perfectly flagrant before ending your day”.

String Parade teases moments from the everyday, fashioning sometimes-ugly windows we urgently press our noses against, abandoning logic-as-usual while stumbling into a fresh encouragement akin to that which motivated Alice, who resolutely embraced the hideous as well as the lovely, even as she grappled with herself in the falling.  Enjoy your flight!

—Amy King

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Jordan Stempleman is the author of Their Fields (Moria, 2005) , What’s the Matter (Otoliths, 2007) , Facings (Otoliths, 2007), and The Travels (Otoliths, 2008).

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