{"title":"Jan Conn","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"edge-effects-book-jan-conn-9781926829777","title":"Edge Effects","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMature poems with their finger on the pulse of the dark side of the present.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Reading \u003ci\u003eEdge Effects\u003c\/i\u003e, Jan Conn's masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky's photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer\/reader for completion. \u003cp\u003e\"Edge effect\" is an ecological term that has to do with the effect on an ecosystem of the juxtaposition of contrasting environments. The poems of \u003ci\u003eEdge Effects\u003c\/i\u003e have their connection to ecological matters, but they also ride other sorts of edge throughout, entering an unstable reality in which both time and space are given to uncanny shifting, so it's \"easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon \/ among many.\"\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMany of the poems in the book are inspired by paintings and drawings, but none of them is the standard ekphrastic exercise: Jan Conn's poems go deep. They are reinventions of often hyper-real environments--astonishingly rich and mobile, nightmarish, splintered, fragmentary and afflicted by flux. Readers of \u003ci\u003eEdge Effects\u003c\/i\u003e will be stirred by an involving, non-coercive, witnessing art of great power.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50426300399889,"sku":"CIN1926829778G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":67615453413649,"sku":"NLS9781926829777","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1926829778.jpg?v=1769509129"},{"product_id":"peony-vertigo-book-jan-conn-9781771316163","title":"Peony Vertigo","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePoems emerging from deep memory and shifting landscapes to joyously engage flora, fauna, and self.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn her latest collection, \u003ci\u003ePeony Vertigo\u003c\/i\u003e, Jan Conn's poetic sensibility disperses and gathers, careens and slides, in and out of relation with the endangered world. Through poems ranging from global to microscopic scales, Conn's beholden, fluid sense of self dissolves into fog and river, and reconstitutes as bright orange newt, prehistoric horse, painter, and mourning daughter. Her voice is vulnerable, ecstatic, and elliptical, a tender exploration of liminal consciousness and the urge to identify with environments in crisis.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":67615487885585,"sku":"NLS9781771316163","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":67625639182609,"sku":"NIN9781771316163","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781771316163.jpg?v=1790906200"},{"product_id":"botero-s-beautiful-horses-book-jan-conn-9781894078719","title":"Botero's Beautiful Horses","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Every drawer in every chest overflows with illogic and passion.\"\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"Do we want love \/ each and every day of our lives?\" Jan Conn asks in a poem called \"Michoacán.\" \"You bet your ass,\" she answers. The poems of Botero's Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist canvases, astonishingly kinetic narratives composed by looking hard at unusual pictures, the artists' writings and their circumstances--and letting them speak for themselves. The book becomes a journey away from the familiar into other cultures, especially Latin American. Poem after poem gathers a sense of inner as well as outward journey away from a \"perilous childhood\" into a wide world rich and strange with a recurrent underworld motif of darkness, blackness. But what a black! Rich and various, life as if viewed in the \"obsidian mirrors the Aztecs fashioned from the dark.\"\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"Colours the Aztecs invented:\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eeagle-devouring-snake black\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eexpansionist black\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eblack of the flowery wars\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003edried-blood black.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThey loved the night creatures: owls, scorpions,\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ebats, the Queen of Spiders.\"\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e--from \"People of the Left-Sided Hummingbird\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":67615540052241,"sku":"NLS9781894078719","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781894078719.jpg?v=1790906530"},{"product_id":"jaguar-rain-book-jan-conn-9781894078481","title":"Jaguar Rain","description":"Poetry. Wonder and hunger to know things drive Jan Conn's JAGUAR RAIN. Wonder draws her as a scientist and writer into the forest of Brazil where she marvels both at life's inventiveness and at the story of the gifted botanist-artist Margaret Mee who hunted orchids in Brazil from the 1950s to the 1980s. So the self in these poised riotous poems is split, the vision compounded, layered. Conn wonders simultaneously at the world she sees firsthand and at teh character of a woman fearless to see more, at the intricacies of plants and insects and those of the imagination, at the rampant forest and the human mind. JAGUAR RAIN is a powerful celebration of both nature and art--John Steffler. Jan Conn lives in Barrington, Massachusetts. She is a scientist whose current biological research focus is on the population of malaria mosquitoes in the Brazilian Amazon. Field work has taken her there since 1973. JAGUAR RAIN is her sixth book of poems. In 2003 a selection of her Amazonian poems won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":67615541625105,"sku":"NLS9781894078481","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781894078481.jpg?v=1790906536"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-jan-conn.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}