Crossings

"Jean Janzen is one of the writers who first awakened me to poetry. It's a great gift to have these poems gathered in a single book. She writes with a grace that only partly disguises a profound complexity, an almost classical music of longing and sounding, praise and sorrow. Her lines are gorgeous and so moving, right through the poems she's writing now, in her nineties." -Jesse Nathan, Author, Eggtooth

Jean Janzen's luminous poetry has been shining its way into top magazines and eight books for decades; this volume gathers poems from all those books and a generous set of new poems. Aware of the darkness of this world, Janzen's poems face it fearlessly yet pursue the consolations and joys that faith, love, desire and language have to offer. In her Crossings title poem, she asks, "The sea so wide and my small boat of words. / What are the lines between the lines?" Each poem hints at answers.

Key notes from Janzen's early poems continue to resonate through all her work: family, including the troubled heritage of her family's history in what is now Ukraine; childhood and adolescence in Mennonite towns in Saskatchewan, Minnesota, and Kansas; the great questions of faith and doctrine; the mysteries, troubles, and joys of living in a woman's body in a beautiful, dangerous world. Then also art, especially Vermeer. And music, so important to Jean and her family. And Fresno, hot yet lush when its canals are full, and the big house where she and Louis entertained poets, artists, musicians, and students.

At a 1995 event to celebrate publication of Janzen's Snake in the Parsonage, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, thinking of Janzen's many years of putting others before her own writing, memorably exclaimed, "She ought to be furious!" It may be hard to find fury in these poems-at least not fury about her own situation. Yet early and late, Janzen's poems reckon with loss, pain, and history, including the traumas her ancestors suffered during the violence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Her lovely, tough, life-giving poems offer rich rewards.