Poet Amanda Dettmann reviewed Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands in the Fall 2023 issue of The Cafe Review.
“These persona prose poems push us to imperfectly observe and participate in the ancient sounds of ocean life within a backdrop of family secrets and unanswered silences. With grief disguised as a “good sauce,” Navicky bends time between the living and the dead like a crab listening to the hum of her ancestors through her own seaweed–slicked shell.”
Jefferson’s poem “Moon Review at the Emergency Vet” appeared on Maine Public’s Poems from Here series read by Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma. The poem originally appeared in Southern Humanities Review.
Thanks to Editor Megan Grumbling for including HIBRO in the July 9 2023 Deep Water Column.
The former Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, Judy Kaber, included a prose poem from Head of Island Beautification in her column, Poet's Walk, in The Republican Journal.
Thanks to Exacting Clam, and Sagging Meniscus Press, for publishing three poems, including “Mid-American Science Fiction.” Cover art by the multi-talented Jesi Bender.
Jefferson’s review of Dana Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon 2022) is in the Spring 2023 issue of The Cafe Review:
“The book is shot through with [doubt]. In ‘For the Poets,’ a poem that hoarse whispers in all us poets’ ears, Levin writes, ‘if only three people like a tweet does anything you offer sound in the forest?’ This is the kind of doubt that heads straight to the heart to ask, ‘why . . . do any of us do any of this?’”
Many thanks to Nina MacLaughlin, who called Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, "peculiar, beautiful, beguiling” in the February 26th edition of the Boston Sunday Globe. She writes, “There is good heat here, like the hot sauces Bird uses, and sauce serves as paint, as creative juice, as flavor enhancer, as ingredient uniter.”
Jefferson’s novel in prose poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (AC Books 2023), is NOW AVAILABLE for order from Small Press Distribution.
