Reading Groups: Jill Osier's The Solace is Not the Lullaby
This is the introduction and discussion thread for the reading group on Jill Osier’s The Solace is Not the Lullaby.
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A Brief Introduction
I chose Jill Osier’s The Solace is Not the Lullaby for our November book because of her mastery of clarity and brevity. Her poems interrogate common feelings about loneliness, death, sex, story, and possibility. Her use of fragments and precision is less about establishing facts, but about giving specificity to mystery and truth.
Her poems are neither confessional, narrative, or meditative, but somewhere between/among them all. Nuanced and enigmatic, clear and mysterious, microscopic and telescopic…the book is important.
Osier was born in 1974 and grew up in Iowa and now lives in Alaska. In June 2021 she suffered serious injuries as a pedestrian in a vehicle-pedestrian accident in Fairbanks, but has since been recovering. The Solace is Not the Lullaby is her first book.
What do you notice about the poems’ syntax? How does Osier pivot away from the usual adjective + noun construct?
How do the poems use vulnerability?
The book begins with an imperative, “Listen.” How does this set the tone for the rest of the poems?