Wholesale My Enemies

Jane Gregory’s My Enemies records a poet’s search for meaning in a landscape of combined and dissolving definitions. Affirming disaster and its beyond, these poems sing toward belief—a self-made belief that will not rely on any static symbol or logic or idol. Gregory’s dynamic, unpredictable enactments of the modern world avow vulnerability to a belief compatible with self-consciousness. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes overcome or self-ruinous, My Enemies never halts in its search for definition, even when it claims to not have been written—as in the serial “Book I Will Not Write” poems. Each poem here establishes a new, necessary material and mode for our uncertain world that can offer its readers something to believe in.Jane Gregory is from Tucson and lives in Oakland. She is co-founder and co-editor of Nion Editions, a chapbook press.