Publications
Here find published work by poet and performer Mara Jebsen.
Alphabet
Mara Jebsen's chapbook is a child's abecedarium with a flash of Lear and a touch of history and bursts of exuberance amid Dadaist play. Image and sound are lovingly and gleefully arranged in whimsical visual fields. And behind it all a single, powerful, bewildered heart is singing. I love a collection that starts with Ardor.—Patrick Rosal, author of Brooklyn Antediluvian
Harnessing the abecedarian form to visit language's hidden signs, ghosts, traces, and remains, the poems in Mara Jebsen's Alphabet brave deep political and philosophical questions even as they offer dazzling improvisations. Like Harryette Mullen, Jebsen knows that voracious word-play, when coupled with a masterful grasp of form, can uncover not only our etymological motives but also our deepest yearnings.
"[X], unknown, unknowable/ unknowable cross; god's mark," she writes near the end of her alphabetical journey, always urging her readers to see how linguistic associations "meet" and "cross" the spiritual. From ardor to zebra, she shows us persuasively and fearlessly why "these rare things/ bring us to marvel."
- Michael Tyrell, author of The Wanted
Find links to purchase Alphabet, Poetry by Mara Jebsen:
Finishing Line Press
Amazon
Print Poems (excerpts)
P speaks:
I've been known, I suppose
to be precise and prissy.
To pin my pins to the proper
pincushions. To have fingertips
like paper. To be pent up and prim.
Virgin
A vessel is a vessel—it holds
what it holds. In green-violet-black sub-strata
soils: every event in non-linear time.
Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Not-Natale
I have come for the ocean, to hear it sing
feathers, salt, faces in foam
thick salt-crust and fish-white--
W is for Wine
Then once, or often, the moon, the moon
like a seed from its skin, slipped-bang
on the floor.
Essays
Girls on Fire
This summer I had a crush on Edie Sedgwick. Recently, I tried to “be” both Edie and Andy Warhol for Halloween. It was easy, because he used to dress like her. The source of her ability to fascinate is hard to explain, even now that she's dead–and I imagine it was even harder for her devotees to explain back then. Over the summer, I read several books about Edie, all of which were half-dominated by glossy photos. In a short time, I developed the sort of crush good girls get on bad girls in Junior High. It just seemed sort of fascinating… read more
Zoned Out: Boredom In A Digital Age
“Peoples bore me, literature bores me. Especially great literature”
-–John Berryman
It is Thursday and I am in the café in which the ceiling fan and rock’n’roll seem to make a gentle pact to keep rhythm. To the left of me lies one Brooklyn neighborhood, and to the right, another. Above these ceiling fans are two apartments stacked on each other, but I don’t know how they are shaped or furnished. Above them is the sky, which today is blue-mottled with clouds. The café basement, which I have never seen, hums below us, and below that, I imagine… read more
