Release Date: April 9, 2024
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57869-168-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023952316
eBook: 978-1-57869-171-5
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

SYNOPSIS

Moving between songful expressions of mourning, solace, delight, and play, poems in Stonechat span themes of family, grief, joy, beauty, human nature, the natural world, love, parenting, and discovery. Within these pages Jacobsen explores, sometimes in form and sometimes in invented form, how the world appears, how we live in the world, and how she responds to the world, whether in relationship to others, to nature, or to the imaginative musings of the creative spirit.

PRAISE

“Stonechat is a remarkable book, fluent, fluid, formal, and fresh. Deeply connected to family and a New England landscape she knows intimately, Mary Elder Jacobsen carefully shapes each poem to its subject, the poems soaring with an easy, unforced lyricism…these beautiful poems confirm the singularity of Jacobsen’s experience.”

—Elizabeth Spires, author of A Memory of the Future

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“Jacobsen’s strong, clear poems make an accidental almanac for loving the passage of days…she deploys a variety of poetic forms with playful excellence—a crown of sonnets, ghazal, villanelle, ekphrastic—anyone could wander into this work and find a resonant sentiment. The collection as a whole encompasses, investigates, and celebrates Ceres’ vicinity—as Jacobsen both invokes the goddess of grain and the harvest by including a pasture’s worth of plants in her poems... Across the volume, the poet’s sustained gaze at motherhood, daughterhood, a cherished husband and son, as well as a deep understanding of home allows readers ‘the rare particulars’ of Jacobsen’s ‘intimate brilliance.’”

—Julia Shipley, award-winning journalist and poet, author of The Academy of Hay

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“In poem after poem, Mary Elder Jacobsen delights her reader with a vision, upended: the newborn’s bath becomes the dying father’s; the bees we keep, keep us…Like water finding its basin (of course Jacobsen lives on a lake!), the poems form, as ode, villanelle, sonnet—each holding but not containing the perfect punctuated surface that reflects the world she breathes.”

—Jody Gladding, author of I entered without words

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“In poem after poem in Stonechat, Mary Elder Jacobsen maintains an Edenic wonder at the natural world with a verbal music that flows with internal rhymes, alliteration, and cascading lyrical lines. Charged with unslaked enthusiasm for her subjects, the poet sustains riveting attention to her immense particulars that add up to a poetic sum that is greater than the whole of her subjects, and conceits by virtue of their verbal magic in which they continue to ‘sing’ anew each time they’re read or heard.”

—Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015-2019)

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“I have been a fan of Mary Elder Jacobsen’s incisive and precise poems for many years now. From the opening sequence of Stonechat, it’s evident that her debut collection is a culmination of countless hours of devotion to craft and love for the actual world.”

—James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion

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“I hardly know where to begin—with Jacobsen’s studious and precise eye? her deft musicality? her formal inventiveness? with the way these poems enact deep love for family and the natural world? The poems in Mary Elder Jacobsen’s Stonechat rove between intimacies, seeing with an eye both human and mythic, their gaze cutting across a full life and a secluded patch of land that seems, at the same time, as big as the world. These poems sing and dig. I was sideswiped by ‘Sorting the Dark from the Light,’ a poem about washing a mother’s ‘last nightgown’—the way this poem treads into duality, building a waltz between the living and the dead, ending ‘We’re waltzing, not weeping. / Stop weeping, we’re waltzing.’”

—Kerrin McCadden, author of American Wake

Reviews & In the News

Story Comic Podcast, Apr 23, 2024: (Episode 351): Mary Elder Jacobsen’s 'Stonechat': A Tapestry of Human Emotion

Orca Media, April 13, 2024: PoemCity Rootstock Poetry Reading VIDEO.

The Montpelier Bridge, April 2, 2024: Book Reviews for Poetry Month 

The Eagle Times, March 19, 2024: Three Vermont poets reading debut books April 13 in Montpelier

The Hardwick Gazette, March 11, 2024: Calais Poet Reads from Debut Book April 13

MEET THE AUTHOR

Mary Elder Jacobsen was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. She holds a BA with honors in art from Goucher College, an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she was a teaching fellow, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals and have been selected for anthologies, radio, Poetry Daily, and other distinctions. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, she lives in North Calais, Vermont. Stonechat is her debut poetry collection.