Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
MEB
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 Transitory by Jane
Augustine
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In
dream language, poet Jane Augustine captures the vivid, bright, sadness
of life
surrounding
love and death, particularly when death comes
to someone young—
in this case,
her daughter-in-law, Michelle (born Phuong
Vu), a child-survivor of
the war in
Vietnam. With riveting details of beauty and
pain, Augustine opens the
heart with
how truly Transitory life really is—the title of
her poignant “poem sequence.”
Marilyn Webb, author of The Good Death: The New
American Search to Reshape the End of Life
Jane Augustine’s moving meditation on her young
daughter-in-law’s death also engages an
ancient inquiry into the purpose of poetry
itself. “Alone
in a cold house,” as she writes in one
of the spare, transparent poems in the sequence,
“I think
of books—how long they last, how
late it is.” The lateness of the hour she
invokes is not
only the heart-wrenching early loss of
youth and love that stalks this book, but also
the late
moment of our own times, the wars
and miseries we rain down on our kind. This
document of
enduring, patient witness belongs
to the world of “voice” rather than to the genre
of poem or
prose. It is a luminous companion
from—and for—a hard time. Patricia
Hampl
Jane
Augustine
Jane Augustine
has
published three chapbooks, Lit by the
Earth’s Dark Blood, Journeys,
and
French
Windows, a much-anthologized short story
Secretive, and poems
in many literary
magazines.
Winner of two Fellowships in Poetry from
the
New York State Council on the Arts,
she also has
a Ph.D. with specialization
in modern women
writers. She is the editor of The Gift by H.D.: The
Complete Text
(University
Press of Florida, 1998) and has taught at
Pratt Institute,
The New School, and
Naropa University. She lives
in New York City and Westcliffe, Colorado.
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