Black Radish Books, paperback
Publication Date: September 15, 2017
Publisher Marketing:
What's the ANYJAR? I think it's a space where anyone keeps loss. Or it is itself loss, but it's also the jar you make to store loss in. When you are building what you are simultaneously trying to understand, it's easy to get stuck in it, because the Anyjar isn't separate from you. It's hard to get a grip on how memory holds absence in its clear walls. But Jaimie Gusman, in this moving, slippery, smart, ambitious book, cracks the problem open. --Catherine Wagner
ANYJAR shows that a poet--if that poet has Jaimie Gusman's gifts of seeing, knowing, loving, wondering, wandering and sharpening--can write magic without merely being whimsical, can write about reproduction without falling into mist, can take on the great mysteries of death, loss, memory, and family, and still say something wildly new. I love these poems; they make me feel like I'm flying (and not quite like a bird: birds are vexed symbols in this book) because when I read them I'm in the presence of an artist who can make words, feelings, moments, news, newness. fly. Earthward, heaven- bound, speedy or floating, Gusman makes consciousness feel like freedom, like the endlessness of air and possibility even while we're in our bodies, sitting, suffering, remembering, grieving, desiring, or reading. --Brenda Shaughnessy
