If Some God Shakes Your House (Paperback)

If Some God Shakes Your House By Jennifer Franklin Cover Image
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Description


Jennifer Franklin reimagines an Antigone for our times in her third collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance. Franklin’s Antigone is ferocious, feeling, and unafraid of the consequences of speaking the truth to power about the political atrocities she has witnessed and personal traumas she has withstood. With a sensitivity that equally elevates the quotidian and the classical, and an attention that moves from the ancient ruins of Pompeii to the right of bodily autonomy and agency stripped away by our own Supreme Court, Franklin reveals the high stakes of our moment where “the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.” Franklin’s Antigone has embraced the sacrifice of self for something greater—a dual devotion to her disabled daughter and to her art. “For twenty years, I have been disappearing,” she writes in the book’s final poem, yet she continues to sing.

About the Author


Jennifer Franklin is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her work has been published widely in print and online, including American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, The Nation, New England Review, the Paris Review, “poem-a-day” series for the Academy of American Poets on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, and RHINO. She received a City Corps Artist Grant in poetry from NYFA and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Grant for Literature in 2021. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. She also teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program. She lives with her husband and daughter in New York City. Her website is jenniferfranklinpoet.com.

Praise For…


“Urgent, tense, and fateful — Jennifer Franklin throws her voice in these taut lyrics and prose poems that view her own experience through a dramatic lens, the voice of Antigone come back to face the rockiness of our moment and the inevitability of death. This serious, unremitting book will leave you shaken by the furies, the randomness of destiny, and the gravity of life.” —Edward Hirsch



“‘Once I discovered / home was a lie I told myself,’ Jennifer Franklin writes, ‘I shoveled the dirt to bury my life.’ These poems — at once brutal and blooming — speak in the voice of a modern-day Antigone, a voice filled with soil and song, a voice strained by the burdens of gendered kinship duty and state violence. Franklin’s work moves across the boundaries of the mythic and the mundane, the mother and the child, the scarred body and the exalted promise, the prose poem and the sonnet, the womb and the tomb, the living and the dead. She instructs us how to hold ourselves and our beloveds — wretched and wondrous — through our living, dying, earth-bound days: ‘Anyone can throw // a corpse below the ground. It takes love / to prepare a body for the earth.’” —Deborah Paredez



“Jennifer Franklin’s If Some God Shakes Your House reinvigorates our collective archetypes by marrying them to harrowing, personal, contemporary content, ‘Like holding a blossom that becomes the whole world.’ Franklin’s weaving of the political, the intimate, natural and human history, and visual and literary ekphrasis is visionary, tragic, and grand. Each dimension buttresses and expands the possibilities of the next, and it takes all of it, the apocalyptic harmonies and disharmonies, to belt out what this speaker carries. At the epicenter of it all is the ferocity and woundedness of the mother. ‘Every ersatz saint knows / endless sacrifice / is suicide. For twenty years, // I have been disappearing,’ she writes in the book’s final poem. The greatest artists sing through disappearance, and beyond it. Even as some God shakes her rafters, Jennifer Franklin sings.” —Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
 


Product Details
ISBN: 9781954245488
ISBN-10: 1954245483
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15th, 2023
Pages: 120
Language: English