Moving dramatically inward from her immense geographic and forensic terrain-Jeanine Stevens investigates Modernist dance, film, painting, collage, masquerade, and psychology in Ornate Persona. She distills her gifts as a lyric anthropologist in this, her most introspective collection thus far. We sense that she’s investigating her own psyche, even while handling such themes as a Nijinsky ballet. Her associative dance leads us fluidly from poem to poem, as she empathizes with the gifted, ill-fated Tanaquil Le Clercq, celebrated dancer and muse to George Balanchine: it is the ballet Afternoon of a Faun which unites Nijinsky and Tanaquil across the decades in Stevens’ mind. And we become one body with Nijinsky himself, admiring our own sinew. My Egyptian eyes, lacquered hair / body taped / like a character doll. Was it a dream feathering down my neck / or just thoughts, leaf points growing / from the green felt skullcap?

Stevens’ power to captivate guides us from a Joseph Cornell box to familiar 20th-century masterworks like the film Black Orpheus, then to the mysterious series of mandalas created by Carl Jung’s patient, Miss X. Stevens’ poetry keeps us reading, thinking, and feeling.

-Tom Goff, author Twelve-Tone Row: Music in Words.