What is Jehanne Dubrow reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow, author of three poetry collections including Stateside (Northwestern University Press 2010).

Part of her entry:

My second work-in-progress is a collection of linked essays about my experiences as a military wife. When I finished writing the poems in Stateside, I realized that I wasn’t yet done with the subject of “milspouse” life. There were still other stories I wanted to tell, not as poems but as prose. So, I’ve been reading a lot of creative nonfiction. I’ve just started Alison Buckholtz’s memoir, Standing By: The Making of a Military Family in a Time of War. I’m interested in the book’s perspective because, like me, Buckholtz falls into the category of a “nontraditional” military wife. I’m also rereading Lia Purpura’s exquisite book, On Looking. These lyrical essays, with their precise metaphors and vivid images, demonstrate why so many poets are able to make the leap from verse to nonfiction. Purpura’s essay, “Autopsy Report,” is worth the price of admission alone. After watching a day of autopsies performed in the morgue, Purpura steps outside to discover that “everything looked as it always had—bright and pearly, lush and arterial after the rain.”...[read more]

Among the early praise for Stateside:

In Jehanne Dubrow’s Stateside, the formalities of structure—rhyme and meter—play against the formalities imposed upon the life of a military wife. there are poems in marching meters and poems that provide counterpoint to those rhythms, but most of all, hers is a fully experienced suite, fully composed in every sense of that word, both intimate and public, an accomplished book. She is a contemporary Penelope whose tale is epic.
—Sam Hamill, author of Almost Paradise: Selected Poems & Translations

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Stateside (Northwestern University Press 2010), which describes her experiences as a "milspouse." Her first book, The Hardship Post (2009), won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, and her second collection From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Competition (2009). Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, The Promised Bride, in 2007.

Read "Against War Movies" and sample other poems by Jehanne Dubrow, and visit her website and blog.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow.

--Marshal Zeringue