World of Made and Unmade

On the National Book Award Longlist for Poetry 2016

World of Made and Unmade is a deep blue yarn of very fine thread. We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead’s poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacan waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up. –C.D. Wright

Jane Mead’s fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We’re drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.

… This year I have disappeared from the harvest routine–

the pickers throwing their trays under the vines, grape hooks flying, the heavy bunches flying–

pickers running to the running tractors with trays held high above their heads and the arc of dark fruit

falling heavily into the half-ton bins.

The hornets swarming in the diesel-filled air.

Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently MONEY MONEY MONEY / WATER WATER WATER (2014). Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.