"This powerful work reproduces the shock of the life that millions of people lead in silence, in darkness. These poems can wake up a rock."—Etel Adnan, author of Sitt Marie Rose
"Kim Jensen’s poems are searing and spare. They will haunt you and stretch your vision. You won’t be the same person after reading them that you were before."—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi and Going, Going
"In a time of news about war we can only reflect the devastation of others. What comes in can’t come out. True resistance seems muted, dissolved. Here we arrive at just such a landscape, but perhaps because it is a woman’s terrain, we are at least given bread."—Fanny Howe, award-winning poet and author of On the Ground
Description
In this provocative collection, Kim Jensen gives voice to the struggle of those who seek love in a world saturated with brutality and aggression. Using accessible language and raw imagery, this work offers a searing portrait of the ruins of love and war. The concise lyrics in Bread Alone condemn the violence in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, while exploring the intimate consequences of these and other injustices. Darkly humorous, grotesque, sorrowful, outraged, and sometimes poignantly hopeful, these poems possess a strange beauty and remind us of the key purposes of poetry—to warn and to revive our sense of conscience and connection.
About the Author
Kim Jensen is the author of the novel The Woman I Left Behind. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, The Baltimore Review, Al Jadid, Rain Taxi Review, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Left Curve, and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County in Maryland.
October 2009