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.
