Cover art by Alexandra Culp
Co-winner of the Paper Nautilus 2020 Debut Series Chapbook Contest
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Poetry | 32 pages | 5.5″ x 8.5″ | $8.00
Praise:
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These are poems of quietly devastating grief, life-haunted poems of absence, breath-taking for their clear, lyrical language, their precise and loving rendering of the physical world, their nuanced explosion of image into image, poems that move beyond elegy toward a deeper imagining. Here, death is a kind of disappearance, yes, but also a mystery, a transformation, “the swarm of cells rearranging themselves/ into something other/ … of never before;” here, each existence, human and otherwise, is “a brief but holy thing.” Reading these poems I was reminded of how, while the shape of our grief changes over time, grief also changes us, alters us permanently, becoming part of who and what we are, deepening us, making us also more holy in its wake.
— Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
Grief recasts everything, suddenly and sharply. It uproots the ghosts—of our childhoods, our ancestors, our collective and private memories—and transforms the concrete world we thought we knew into one now fluctuating and liminal. The Song of Our Disappearing navigates the bewildering aftermath of a father’s death, finding a clear and rising voice somewhere between the stark hospital room that holds the ventilator’s sharp hiss and the remembered dust of the racetrack where hooves pullclouds from the ground. Elegy becomes an act of metamorphosis as Ja’net Danielo excavates both past and present to reveal a song unearthed from the ash of the heart—a lyric guide for walking with, listening to, and being transformed by the losses that haunt us most.
— Julia Bouwsma, author of Midden and Work by Bloodlight
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I can’t helped being knocked out and also deeply inspired by the summoning voice and vision of Ja’net Danielo. The poems in her debut collection The Song of Our Disappearing are breathtaking in their rich and fulsome physicality, their deft shaping of personal, familial, and corporeal landscapes around her, and the pitch-perfect songs that burn brightly through crucial and complex human concerns of death, grief, longing. So much to admire here, and to look forward to in this poet whose generosity of spirit and breadth of imagination match the vibrancy of natural and lived in worlds she observes so carefully, inhabiting desire through poetry that honors “the language of horses […] those beautiful machines […] Not of blood, but of dust—a song unearthed from the ash of the heart.”
— Michelle Bitting, author of Broken Kingdom