Fiction

Non-Fiction

Poetry

MEB

Triton

The Spark Singer by Jade Sylvan

Jade Sylvan’s poems are ornaments to holidays that don’t exist yet. Something
with candles. Our first instinct is to treat them with extreme care, but not out of
fragility, just the understanding that the sacred has occurred.  Magic.
Too much of the world fit into this small ritual. 
           Brian Ellis, author of Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom

Jade Sylvan’s poems exhibit the daring of the coquette. If there is evidence of calculated and
flagrant provocation, the fl agrancy softens under the solvency of an earnest and wistful longing.
That longing is tempered in the kiln of molten experience; that kiln is fi red by a hunger that drives
this poet to seek knowledge, deep andwide-ranging. If her eloquent and meticulous craft sometimes
surpasses the bounds of its prescribed forms, it is only because her characters cannot resist
undoing the stays of their corsets. The flood of passion that generated these poems saturates
every sandbag piled up to hem it in.       Tom Daley

Jade Sylvan transcribes our strangers and familiar scripts to the page without the fear of
romanticizing the bottle in the artist’s hand, the kid slumming in expensive shoes, the husk of
smoke rubbed voices. She then casts them alongside literary and mythological icons, not
flinching as she offers the notion that we often do not learn from history. In a time when
many writers are attempting to bow down to the reader or listener, Jade’s work is unapologetic
without being violent or cruel. Making comparisons is cheap but I thought of Anne Sexton
when reading these poems... usually right before Sylvan’s work jarred me back to its gaze.
At once playful and icy, this book should be in your hands—open. 
                 James Caroline, author of NeonHospital