Jennifer Perrine
Again

Again riffs on common words—tremendous, terrific, disaster, wall, ban—that have been overused and misused in recent years, made to carry the weight of disturbing connotations.

In poems that speak through both a collective voice and a singular, personal one, Again maps the emotional territories of this specific—but not unique—moment in United States history. Jennifer Perrine’s poems trace a path through this surreal landscape, illuminating a terrain of disorientation, grief, and shame at the America we have made. Again is an anthem, a reckoning for the “land of the smack that makes us see stars, home of the belt that stripes our backs.”

Drawing on allusions that range from nursery rhymes and folk tales to Simone de Beauvoir and The Wizard of Oz, the poems explore the nuances of each fraught word, recollecting its various meanings and resisting monolithic rhetoric. Through wordplay and wry wit, Again steals these words back, infusing the language “once more / with feeling.”

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-03-2
Paperback: SALE PRICE NOW THROUGH MARCH 2024: $12 (Regular price: $16)
Publication date: September 1, 2020

Jennifer Perrine is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently No Confession, No Mass, winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Perrine’s other books include In the Human Zoo, which was selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and The Body Is No Machine. A recipient of fellowships from Literary Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon.   

Praise for Again

In Again Jennifer Perrine deepens the rhetoric of idioms and presidential tweets, restoring adjectives like "tremendous" and "terrific" to complexity and nuance. Perrine looks both at what the individual self and individual words mean in a country that feels dystopian. These poems speak to the collective of a nation who is bearing a time full of disconnection and emotional hungers, but still "among the most decent of sinners." With these sensuous and often mythic makeovers, language shines again, even burns, but most importantly words start to mean again.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

The tone of Again is bleak, brutally satiric. Its voice is richly musical, deeply archetypal. And the combination is riveting. This collection’s poet-Scheherazade resides in a house with “boards nailed over every window / and door, no entrance, no way out.” But language does indeed give us a way to get out, a way to transcend. In this stunning indictment of American culture, the poet brings considerable talents to bear on making us achingly aware of the ingrained injustice in our society. Jennifer Perrine summons poetry’s powerful devices to tell us the brutal truth.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

A fusion of the ageless and the dystopian, these compelling, first-person, allegorical narratives by Jennifer Perrine plunge us directly into the dark consequences of power and greed run amok, with more than a few hints that connect these poems to the United States of the late 2010s. Yet somehow, miraculously, these brilliant exposés-in-metaphor are not just bearable, with their understated glimmers of strength, endurance, and nuanced hope. They are beautiful. The poet’s language absolutely sings; even when the song is grim, it holds us up. Like a short story, this stunning book calls to be read in one sitting. In your hands is one of the best books of our time. I can’t praise it enough.   

—Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong

The collective voice seems particularly hard to grasp at a time when our communities, country, and world deal so heavily in the currencies of isolation and fracture. But in Again, Perrine uses that collective voice to offer us a poetic (and prophetic) antidote to the long tradition of American exceptionalism. While myth-making implies invention, particularly of the grandiose kind, myths also remind us of those core truths of love, fear, intolerance, and hope that we live our lives by. Perrine turns the bombastic on its head in these poems and gives us the myth of our country’s current moment in a voice at once Greek chorus and intimate monologue, reminding us of the very shared humanity we cannot afford to ignore.

—Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms

Excerpts from Again

Press

no charges, though he deserves it. I cannot risk

the law, its long reach. There is no sanctuary,

only bigtooth leaves at their most golden, folded

between the pages of my prayer book. I preserved

what I could. I ironed his best shirt the morning

we married, let him plead his case again tonight.

We proceed, history heavy in our pockets.

My tongue runs over sockets where my teeth once were

white as the sun glinting on the river, shining

through blinds, falling on our bed, warming it with light.

Deal 

My mother dealt in sorrows, passed them out in rounds, face down,

so we each received an even hand. She was every queen

in the deck. Her men dressed as the one-eyed jacks and the king

with the axe, blade behind the back or turned aside to stay

blind to her weeping. We each awaited our turn, unsure

whether to hold or to cut our loss. We all called, all checked.

She never claimed to know the rules, the difference between raise

and fold. She only knew the stakes. She placed us: her best bets.

World

We are of but not in it. We leave prints
in mud, a blaze of crumbs to mark our path
through vacant tracts. Snow fills our hollow steps. 

We withdraw into our flesh. We relax
into astonishment, watchers behind
glass. We cannot smell the tires burn, the plush 

pink smoke that chuffs from stacks. For all we know,
the ocean still exists beyond the reach
of our sunrise, sunset. We won’t venture 

out until it’s safe again. We’re busy
with danger. We have known the best of both
patting our own and pressing weight on backs,       

footfalls on shoulders. Our better angels
and devils crouch close, hunch over, whisper:
We’re not long for this. We wouldn’t miss it.