Craft: Jane Mead

This craft piece was suggested by Mari L’Esperance. If you have an idea for the Sharpener, please let me know here:

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Jane Mead (1958-2019) was a significant, underrated poet, but also a literary citizen. She co-owned the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, and taught at New England College.

Mead’s poems are often spare in their style and presentation, but have an enormous impact. Her poems are concerned mainly with ecological genocide and fragility; fragility of the land itself, the people who work the land, and the animals who live there.

Her poems are about the near-death experience, as are all good poems. The near-death experience, the poems insist, are the awareness that we collectively are being murdered by the fossil fuel industry and our chance to reverse the climate emergency is soon over. Her later, profound poems deal with her mother’s death, and the these speak in a tongue that pushes into a dark and tumbling uncertainty.

Mead at her family ranch in Napa County, Northern California