Review of BEDFUL OF NEBRASKAS by Jill Osier, sunnyoutside, PO Box 911, Buffalo,
NY 14207,
sunnyoutside.com, 2012, $20
Review by Barbara
Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES
Jill Osier’s approximately five inches-square chapbook,
BEDFUL OF NEBRASKAS,
contains some quality paper, printing and silk-screening,
and interestingly worded poetry, but her and her publisher’s decision to charge
$20 for 14 pages of print is extremely presumptuous, even if she has published
in such journals as Poetry, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner!
Osier has some odd and intriguing turns of phrase and a keen
sense of dualities and irony. But their snooty art-itude plays out best in the
poem “Night”, where she verges onto Billy Collins-ishness.
“Night…wraps the red brick/elementary school/sitting
snow-capped on a hill/like a nurse/too tired to change/her clothes/…She’s
waited/until all the children have gone/to unwrap what one boy/gave her: /the black
paper napkin,/its strawberry, each fine/seed intact.”
She gives nature a human mind, as in “The Temperature
Outside Your Car”:
“Take chickadees: they/are never satisfied. That one/does
things with clouds/That thing one does with clouds,/trees work too. Over
there’s a crucifix,/over there a table chair.”
To tell you too many more lines might take away from the $20
experience you might enjoy in the future if she does a Selected or Collected
Poems. Or you could jump in for this small work for the right to read “You
Can’t Buy Shoes in a Painting” or “Yesterday the Girl with the Sad Half-Moon
Mouth Said the North Pole Could Be Anywhere”.
I liked the prose poem called “Wyoming” which begins “You recognized the
land, and I recognized you” and ends “You were a boy, and you were not a boy,
and you were beside me.”
In any case, look for the name Jill Osier. She might already be well-known to some
readers of the small press. After all,
she didn’t even add a biography.
As a writer, I'm smiling at that "Billy Collings-ishness"!
ReplyDeleteExcellent review, Barbara. The little book couldn't have landed in better hands for thoughtful scrutiny and diagnosis. There's no doubt I will join the long line with my 20 bucks ready if she ever comes peddling them with aloof discreetness in the East.
ReplyDeleteWell, I will give the reviewer credit for demonstrating the ability to write a review that says more about them than the chapbook they are reviewing. Slam the cost (though it sounds like a fair amount of hand-crafting went into its creation (hand-sewn [assume this is the binding], letterpress and silk-screened cover")--guess I will have to buy it to find out). Then the snide comment about where she has published: Barbara, what am I sensing here, something green-eyed? And then some thin analysis of two of the poems before more slamming. Epic in its own "art-itude" to borrow a coined word! Anyway, here is another review that I found provided a more well-rounded overview of Osier's chapbook: http://www.prickofthespindle.com/reviews/6.2/osier/osier.htm
ReplyDeleteJill Osier is a genius. This book is well- worth the $20. I’m looking now to purchase a second copy in case I should lose the first. She has several books out since this first one, but I just re-read this one. Jill is a master of writing poems that feel they should not hold together but do.
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