The Mood Ring

In The Mood Ring Diaries, Jessica Thompson crafts a solar system orbited by iron lungs and Marlboro men, nightgowns and cradlesongs, and "ghost horses with red manes." She shifts swiftly between cold metal and heat lightning, chasing beauty through language, which she captures in potent images like "bible-black eyes" and "women who spin aimlessly inside black holes." Predominantly unfolding in controlled couplets, these poems pulse with a feral urgency as they explore desire, myth, and matriarchy, unfurling their song and strength "into a darkening sky." Like a lullaby for the shipwrecked and silenced, The Mood Ring Diaries charts a constellation of both warning and welcome.

-Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and The Under Hum

Jessica D. Thompson's startling new collection, The Mood Ring Diaries, is both grounded in earth knowledge and wondrous in starry possibility. The journey of cradle to crone imaginatively framed by diary entries of five personas, Thompson's imagery is magical and otherworldly. These fierce women, "wearing the white of the sacrificed," yet each a wildling in her way, remind us to be "sky daughters," to gather the kindling for making our own language, to braid ourselves into bee and bark and leaf, to ascend ever higher.

-Linda Parsons, author of Valediction: Poems and Prose

Thompson's skill as a writer is like a sleight-of-hand, her poetry a subtle yet profoundly rendered vehicle for personal metamorphosis. The alchemy of her language is that it renders the familiar as mythic, the small moments from youth as sensually epic: "our tongues tasting / of honeysuckle and heat lightning."

-Mindy Kronenberg, poet, professor at SUNY Empire State University, editor of Oberon poetry magazine, author of Dismantling the Playground and Open