Praise for Girl in a Bear Suit
“Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s Girl in a Bear Suit effervesces with wit, imagination, and sheer verve. Here are poems that dare to revel in multiplicities, embracing our transformations as ongoing and likely synchronous and flaunting language that finds in restlessness the heart’s inherent intelligence. The woman is a bear and the bear is a woman and all are beasts and all are stars in the night sky of this dazzling first book. When the poet writes: “I woke up brilliant in a forest,” I believe her and you should too.”
- Jennifer Chang
“In Girl in a Bear Suit, her dazzling debut collection, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn wrestles with Ovid’s Callisto, the girl whose punishment for her own rape was to be turned into a bear, landing her in our current moment, with a Jupiter who “LIKES BEER” and “presents a calendar that doesn’t actually say “harm Callisto” anywhere.” With keen insight, genuine humor, and heat-seeking playfulness, the poems in this collection travel far, creating their own propulsive force, going beyond what it means to be a victim (or a woman, or a bear, for that matter) and getting to the heart of what it means to be a human.”
- Carrie Fountain
“Flip through this book until you come across a title that grabs you. That won’t be difficult. “Love Poem for Seven Starlings,” “Bodies Becoming Other Bodies,” “Callisto: crash course for one who’s never lived as a human woman,” “Sugar Snow,” “Ars Poetica: As Many as Bones in the Human Body,” “Look, Little Donkeys,” ... I mean, come on! Then start reading and enter the playful, dramatic, wonderfully poetic world of Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s Girl in a Bear Suit.”
- Christopher Citro
