Red Ocher

March 2023
University of Arkansas Press
Finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Order: University of Arkansas Press | Bookshop.org

In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

Praise for Red Ocher:

“In Red Ocher, Jessica Poli juxtaposes two rich and seemingly unlikely veins of obsession—that of farming and animal husbandry and that of emotional and sensual intimacy—to create truly refreshing poems about mortality and deep affection. Indeed, what we see in Poli is a poet of tremendous skill. It is hard not to be impressed with her command of detail, her deft use of language to construct, in what are ostensibly specific physical moments, a series of elegiac poems of urgent sentiment and deep feeling. Here is an assured debut of a singular new voice in American poetry.”
— Kwame Dawes, coauthor of unHistory

“Red ocher: a pigment made of rust, of the remnants of collapsing stars; a pigment of the aftermath. And much like its namesake, Jessica Poli’s stunning Red Ocher pieces together a type of holy aftermath, beautiful in its corrosion. These gorgeous, penetrating poems build a somber but sacred world of salvage and care.”
— Gale Marie Thompson, author of Helen or My Hunger

“Red Ocher by Jessica Poli is a lush collection of aubade, cento and ghazal, poems that snug cozily into forms that were born waiting for them, poems that pulse outward from a relentless core of sensuality and heartbreak to embody what nature does to us.”
— Patricia Smith, Series Editor

Excerpts:

“Balm” in The Adroit Journal
“Holmes Lake” in poets.org
“Greenbrier” in Cotton Xenomorph
“Haptic Cento” in Rogue Agent
“Mukahara” in New Ohio Review
“Gastronomy” in Salamander

Reviews:

California Review of Books’ 31 Outstanding Poetry Collections of 2023