[11/05/26] Day, Jean: The Elements

Winter Editions, paperback

Publication Date: November 5, 2026

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In tightly woven yet ludic lyrics, this collection of five long poems mines tropes from embryology, morphology, and silent film to consider the first and lost causes at the foundation of a personal, social, and historical life. Day enlists elements of plant, animal, and psychological human life to ponder little-p politics, distressed personal and world histories, optimism and its opposites, delivering her takes on evolution/dissolution with a tragicomic edge. In Day’s poetic-scientific investigations, jellyfish and “premodern thoughts” transform along slant logics and rhymes into figurations of identity and experience—an apple becomes a pear, then a new version of creation. At the same time, these five long poems put pressure on forms of knowledge and on conceptions of the “natural.” “Morphology makes us strange,” Day says, but it also makes us complicit in the sheer implausibility of human life as we know it: “Yet geometry's no less in the head / than a series of jerks / as we emerge from the water wet / to find ourselves / butts of a formal if not rational / concern.”

Arguing with politics, media, the fables of history, putting humans on the creaturely plane and looking at us there—“queer as a snail” that builds its shell without “recourse to a plan”—this is a book from which you learn stuff: new words, the habits of plants, film editing techniques. The natural world, its images and promises, are appended in lovely-ugly ways to “present wretched conditions” as lines braid, helix, coil, curl in sometimes-riddles, sometimes-slogans, sometimes-jokes, but always urgent in their task. I’ve long admired Day’s poems for their prudent and utopian visions. The Elements is another of her gorgeous books. —Hannah Brooks-Motl

In these crystalline, witty, revelatory poems, Jean Day opens the world to us at its most fundamental level: the elemental constituents of persons, environments, communities. But work such as The Elements doesn’t only uncover the networks and infrastructures of exchange that shape us; it takes a hammer and chisel to them. As Lyn Hejinian once wrote, and as this collection evidences, “Each element of the work, every particular, exists as a point of encounter, rather than of separability.” Through The Elements, we hold the potential for exchange on entirely different terms. —Mia You

In The Elements, Jean Day uses temporal fragments, facts as symbols, and the accretion of pieces through the lens of the political, the historical, and the scientific. Not the female or male gaze, but the plant’s gaze. The future’s incompetence and the past’s unreliability. A beginning you let go of, erased. “You do your ceremony / but the fates do not attend.” Closure is a pun. —Carrie Hunter

A new book by Jean Day is always a cause for celebration, and The Elements is worthy of a weeklong festival—a stunning, magisterial addition to the oeuvre of one of our finest poets. —Kevin Davies