Jill Stengel: tend

From tend:

collaboration, entangled words        unhidden
yet not quite revealed, secret languages
evolve, words pass back and forth   I don’t know
the end of this story confuse annual
and perennial            not patient      learn patience

The Bodily Press has released Jill Stengel’s fourteenth chapbook, tend, in which she creates a series of gestural portraits of real life for this moment. The book is a series of 26 poems representing a moment, record    captured.

The poems of tend parallel memory-making, how we inlay into memory, this process of parts and pieces recalled. They push back to move ahead, creating fragmented narratives, pulling the reader forward, both the reader and the poems seeking more. Stengel’s poems allow for possibilities, they are not prescriptive. They are meant to be open-ended, becoming a personal dialogue between writer and reader.

Stengel’s tend contains internal and external landscapes, contains flowers, colors, contains motion, stillness, silence, words, images, contains that which is unhidden / yet not quite revealed. Though not patient, the speaker of her poems is able to learn patience, learns to wait for signs, and yet learns that to read them is another thing.

While not a prescriptive writer, Stengel does offer one powerful reading suggestion as you encounter her poems in tend: open every window, let in all the light.