JENNIFER L, KNOX on

Sway
Denis Johnson

Since I find you will no longer love,
from bar to bar in terror I shall move
past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth
and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,
their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,
suffer the light from the wrestling arena
to fall all over them. And what they say
blends in the tarantellasmic sway
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad song of harmony and divergence,
the song that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends I did not know who she was.

Jennifer’s fifth book of poems, Crushing It, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020.

Her poems have appeared five times in the Best American Poetry series and in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Currently she is at work on MYCYOWA, a traveling art project designed to increase awareness of mycoremediation.
From 2016-2017, she developed and curated the crowd-sourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth, which was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Over 750 people from around the world contributed to the project.

Jennifer teaches at Iowa State University and in an ongoing series of private creative writing classes online.  She is also the co-proprietor of a small spice company called Saltlickers.