The Thicket: Poems [Paperback]

The Thicketopens into intimate encounters with the more-than-human world—rivers, birds, stones—and with a “you” that is not a person, necessarily, but also not not a person: maybe God, maybe an aspect of the self, maybe neither or both. Often speaking of/to the small or overlooked (weeds by a roadside, an abandoned silo), the poems orient themselves toward edges, transitional spaces like the one where fields shift into woods. Where does one body stop?The Thickettakes an interest in becoming, one thing flowing into something else.“EnteringThe Thicketit’s as if I walk into another world, one where things are more vivid and alive. Like the land of fables and fairy tales, the Technicolor wonder along the yellow brick road.” —Orion

“These incisive and ruminating poems compel readers to look past the distractions of modern life, placing them among weed-ridden roadsides, in flowing rivers, and in the rustling of trees. Through these images, Jueds interrogates what it means to exist, to change, and to search for connection.” —Read Poetry

“What expands inside Jueds’s new book is an irreducible reality—a sense that makes memory flicker, a knowing that underscores the distance between a word and what it calls or recalls.The Thicketswells with feelings too pure to name. It swells with what it cannot explicate, with what it cannot contain in the vessel of its exquisite phrases. And, to be clear, that is not remotely a failure. It is gorgeous.” —Plume Poetry
 “Kasey Jueds’s second collection,The Thicket,has intersecting emotional and imagistic arcs that reward the careful reader with complex realizations that refuse closure. Two questions are skeleton keys that allow the speaker—and the reader—to unlock metaphorical gates of self-awareness: ‘Where am I?’ lÀ