[03/01/26] Magi, Jill: My Penelope

Essay Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: A celebration of poetry and art, a critical look at art historical and literary categories, a view that takes in class, race, gender, the living and the dead all at once: this is My Penelope, whose sister publication, Hinge: Remember Me to Textiles (Nightboat Books, forthcoming), completes a capstone of Magi's poetics. Beginning with nods to Penelope of Homer's Odyssey and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, Jill Magi's essays, like Penelope's unweaving, create space/time for poets—poets who are all of us, whether or not we read or write—to make new life which is making a poem. Collected here are over twenty years of previously published book reviews, essays, and poems-as-essays. Down every avenue of experience and thought, and with every foothold and slippage, sometimes revisiting the same autobiographical and theoretical terrain with a new lens, these essays allow for poetry to lead life's way. This is language as pliant material, favoring relationship over objecthood and movement over arrival.