JENNIFER WALLACE
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  • About
  • Upcoming
  • Poems and Essays
  • Blog
  • THE BEAUTY PROJECT
  • New Work
  • Photos and Video
  • Blog
  • REVIEWS

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NEW REVIEW BY MICHELE MORIN

5/31/2018

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HALF WAY TO ENTIRELY
C.S. Lewis described the human condition as a process of always becoming more of what we already are. These are cautionary words for me at this point in middle age, particularly as I consider the possibilities. In Lewis’s The Great Divorce, the Teacher speaks regretfully of a seemingly harmless woman who has come to the end of her life, not as a “grumbler,” but as “only a grumble.”

It begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. . . You can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. (74, 75)
Thanks be to God, it seems that this tendency can work in positive ways as well, and the poet Hayden Carruth bears witness to this, declaring in his “Testa- ment”: “Now I am almost entirely love.” Whatever sifting and sandpapering process brought him to that state, his words inspired Jennifer Wallace as she collected an offering of her own poems.
In Almost Entirely: Poems (Paraclete Poetry) the reader is treated to the process of a woman becoming. As one who is “predisposed by nature to question everything,” (17) Wallace reconciles her doubts with the pres-
ence of a God who is well able to take in hand her persistent wondering. In the process, God shows up in both surprising and ordinary ways within the pauses: 
https://michelemorin.wordpress.com/2018/05/29/half-way-to-entirely/ 


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MANTA RAYS!

5/8/2018

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I am thrilled to have the honor of spending time with Jann Rosen-Queralt's magnificent photographs of her encounters with mantra rays in the Sea of Cortez and in Indonesia. My essay accompanying her photos, and a poem inspired by her photos, appear in the "Crisis" issue of Full Bleed: A Journal of Art and Design  https://www.full-bleed.org/new-index/.

Here are two of Jann's photographs, the poem, and a link to Jann's website. Please visit and enjoy her inspiring work! 
http://jannrosen-queralt.com.

The full essay can be found here.
Picture
Picture
​Meditation on a Photograph of a Manta Ray
 
Look at you here: unmoving, unnatural in my hands.
The photograph gives you voice--
 
We speak one word: “looking-at-you-looking-at-me.”
 
I want to drop my landed pretenses and slide into the frame,
into your salty, cobalt skies, where I might be decreased under your flexing wing.
 
We speak the same word: “looking-at-you-looking-at-me.”
 
How close you come with your bold, quiet eye--
I shudder to think what you think of me.
 
What secrets do you shelter? Please, something other than
your awful gasping in the nets. What ancient learning will you share?
 
We speak the same word: “looking-at-you-looking-at-me.”
 
Bird-fish, fish-bird—cloak me that I may be freed,
from my parasitic ambitions, my naïve beliefs that I might create a better sea.
 
When I turn this page, return me to myself,
made softer, restless for the newness of our peace.
 
We speak the same word: “seeing-you-seeing-me.”
 
2 Comments

    Author

    Jennifer Wallace is a poet, photographer and teacher living in western Massachusetts. Paraclete Press published her new book of poems, Almost Entirely, in November 2017 and will publish a second collection, Raising the Sparks, in 2021 

    After decades of avoidance and experimentation, she decided in her 50's to get serious about her spiritual practice and is now, mostly, happily settled within her Christian roots.

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