Stateside
Northwestern University Press, 2010
- Winner of the Towson University Prize for Literature.
- Winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry.
- Finalist for the Foreword INDIE Prize in Poetry.
These well-crafted poems by Jehanne Dubrow are, at least for this one reader, like those beautiful and altogether necessary sweaters. They have been patiently, thoughtfully, and artfully knitted by a sometimes anguished, sometimes resigned and always hopeful young woman, well acquainted with the perils of the sea, the perils of war, the perils of loneliness, seeing her husband’s ship just a spot on the horizon, sailing away.
—Ted Kooser, from his preface to Stateside
In Jehanne Dubrow’s Stateside, the formalities of structure—rhyme and meter—play against the formalities imposed upon the life of a military wife. There are poems in marching meters and poems that provide counterpoint to those rhythms, but most of all, hers is a fully experienced suite, fully composed in every sense of that word, both intimate and public, accomplished book. She is a contemporary Penelope whose tale is epic.
—Sam Hamill, author of Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations
In Stateside, Jehanne Dubrow goes beyond recognizing her war-defined narratives’s shared, essential elements with ancient traditions; her suspenseful lyric sequence recalls and richly reclaims them as part of her poems’ own urgent, very present realities. While lamenting the page as “imperfect mirror” of worry and longing, she nevertheless renders the kind of gracefully wrought poems born of such longing in the context of hope, the fusion of “shadow with the shining flare.”
—Claudia Emerson, author of Late Wife
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Related Links
- US Naval Academy Study Guide
- The Daily Beast
- Reading on NPR’s “Fresh Air”
- Stateside, One-Act Opera by Rachel Whelan
- Review in Time Now
Sample Poems