Document Type

Book

Publication Date

1997

Abstract

Poet and critic Tess Gallagher has described Laura Jensen as “the Einstein of the ordinary.” Just as Einstein's theories disrupted the then common-sense understanding of a universe governed by immutable laws, Jensen’s poems transform our view of the everyday things we take for granted, the ordinary birds and flowers we no longer notice. “Behind a poem is a bad intention / to make the reader worry deeply,” Jensen writes in “What Is Poetry?”, a poem from her first chapbook (After 16). Her poems “worry” us because they force us to confront our fear of the unpredictability of the world. J. Bronowski, describing the magnitude of Einstein’s accomplishments, reminds us that within his lifetime Einstein linked forces previously thought to be separate and distinct: “Einstein joined light to time, and time to space; energy to matter, matter to space, and space to gravitation” (256). Jensen’s work achieves something similar, on a more domestic scale. Her celebrations of ordinary miracles are rendered in startling metaphors and unexpected juxtapositions of imagery.

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