Jean Day, The Elements

I dreamed I saw Saint Augustine
alive as
apparently in error
filling up cups
with the subject of seeds 

whose earliest cells
constrict in the middle
to pull apart like donuts in coffee 

phylum above kingdom below class

Below the tree line light flies straight
Below the lake
peer up
From the primitive streak to the primitive knot
not alone in our determination (“Adamant!”)

If you haven’t experienced her work before, I would highly recommend the work of Berkeley poet and translator Jean Day, a poet I only discovered through her collection Late Human (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2021) [see my review of such here], having missed a slew of prior titles including Linear C. (Berkeley CA: Tuumba, 1983), Flat Birds (San Francisco CA: Gaz, 1985), A Young Recruit (New York NY: Roof Books, 1988), The I and the You (Edgemont CT: Potes & Poets, 1922), The Literal World (Berkeley CA: Atelos, 1998), Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (New York NY: Adventures in Poetry, 2006), Early Bird (Philadelphia PA/Providence RI: O’Clock Press, 2014), Daydream (Litmus Press, 2017) and The Triumph of Life (New York NY: Insurance Editions, 2018). Not everything crosses a border into bookstores easily, after all. Her latest is The Elements (Winter Editions, 2026), a quintet of extended, meditative lyrics, collaged and accumulated into sequences composed across a careful pace of quiet wisdom, exploration and examination. “from birth to billboard / neither stepping quite outside of nature nor / phoning it entirely in.” she offers, deep within the second section. “That’s domestication!”

Composed as five extended sequence-sections—“Adamant!,” “Ex Ovo Omnia,” “Swing State,” “Intolerance” and “And Now This”—there’s an unexpected rhythm to her lines and line-breaks, prompting a curious play of cadence, one that pushes for slower, more careful reading, in case something important might be missed if one isn’t careful. As she writes close to the opening of the second poem-section: “Now we come / to the fruit of our labors / tired of economy but bound by a fog / the ballet of which / in the wallet of [.]”  Day stitches together, one might say, the biographical elements of her life, building blocks as a means through to a lyric end, allowing her narrative to be propelled by the curious bends of language and sequenced-thought, offering moments along the way to hold the shape of her examinations. “To stop / before stopping comes / anadromous,” she writes, within the final section, “in cloud form / to chant / or deposit If / crosshairs / cross hairs / flak is the frame / lost / in the up / again [.]” Attending simultaneous minutae and big moments in carved lines, Day articulates a narrative of moments, but as building blocks through a narrative and propulsion of language, and the further one reads through her work, the more one discovers. This is an incredibly rich, subtle and attentive lyric. Or, as the opening page of the poem-section “Swing State” reads:

If the state is a reason
the bud is its cause
on the way to make sense of the sun
leaving us to wonder
where to lay down our tools
and when to extract
bird from birdie
in a game we’ll never learn how to play.
The field of Amanita
on the other hand
seemed fiction to the figure (farmer) (singer) (sister) (son)
who paused by the water to consider
a break in the chain (the great one)
caused by a marriage
to whom you were not supposed.
The plan was hatched
but the rivers would go awry.
Who knew
where the facts would lead us.
God didn’t make the little green apples,
we observe,
and the Wabash is a river of unsteady habits
even now