excerpt

My Dying Sister Turns Her Face from Spring

Oldest and bravest, she stood
between him and the weak,

fearlessly faced the maw—finger
that stabbed, salvo of needle-sharp spittle.

Now forsythias yammer yellow at her,
daffodils mock her for what she cannot do.

I pull the blinds, plant myself between her
and the fierce, unstoppable green.

ABOUT THE POET

B. Fulton Jennes is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. In 2022, Jennes’ poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” won the Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. Her collection Blinded Birds (Finishing Line Press) received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT. She hosts many workshops and readings, both online and in person, including the Poetry in the Garden summer series at Keeler Tavern Museum in Ridgefield.

NOTES

Work in this chapbook first appeared in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Naugatuck River Review, Revenant Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and tiny wren lit.

About the cover artist

Sharmon Davidson has been a graphic designer, a full-time mother, and a teacher, and has exhibited professionally for over 25 years, winning several awards, and appearing in various publications. Davidson’s work originates from a deep belief in the sanctity and interconnection of everything in the universe, which she seeks to communicate through a vocabulary of personal symbols. She is currently represented by the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen Gallery in Berea, Kentucky.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS CHAPBOOK

FLOWN by B. Jennes is a stunning testament to how a traditional elegy can be rendered tender & unsentimental, vast & precise—a vanishing point on the horizon. In these transformative poems of mourning, written in the aftermath of her sister’s death, Jennes demonstrates the power of world-making by inviting readers into the literal & metaphorical “holes,” the limitless, liminal spaces of grief, while writing into the coexistence of past & present, dead & living, grief & remembrance. About the moments before death, she writes: Even as they unfolded, / those moments were becoming / the space where the bird flew, the place where our fear turned / to laughter turned to wind turned / to silence turned us to meteors. Where does our grief begin & end? With what do we fill the spaces left by the dead? And how do we—how can we—let absence fill them?

Joan Kwon Glass, Author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press 2024) & Night Swim (Diode 2022)

From a bird sweeping the “space above us” in its opening poem, to the collection’s final line (and exquisitely chosen title), birds of all kinds animate the delicate, spare poems in B. Fulton Jennes’ FLOWN. With variations on My Dead Sister, My Dying Sister, Dies, or Death resounding in nearly every title, Jennes delivers her unwavering, clear-eyed poems with a heartache made all the more unbearable by their simplicity. Weaving between the heart-rending specificity of childhood memories and the inexorable progress that unfolds from the first ominous MRI to the end of her sister’s life, Jennes’s revelatory poems capture the mystery of both a life and its loss. Like the song of “A Mockingbird (that) Sings as My Sister Dies,” these poems fill the “night, summoning a life,” then “begin again—testing a new song/far away.”

Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Author of One Less River (Mayapple Press 2019) and Maumee, Maumee (Alice Green & Co. 2022)