Firewatch - Jan Verberkmoes

Firewatch lives in the porous recesses of recollection and the uncertainty felt when re-entering traumatic psychological and physical territories. White space as the natural silence of the page—the indefinable, yet present matter that pushes the text into place—permeates the collection as a kind of repression. Italicized fragments wind through the poems as an other-worldly tether that binds the speaker to the subconscious voices of its othered self. These elements grow together into a larger portrayal of the speakers’ evolving relationship to the quiet violence of deterioration, to a threatening and threatened landscape, and to the fractures between perception and comprehension into which they slip.

About Jan Verberkmoes

Jan Verberkmoes is a poet and editor from Oregon. She received her MFA from the University of Mississippi, where she was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared in The Paris Review, Lana Turner, and Denver Quarterly, among others. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a 2018-19 Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University, and a 2019-20 Fulbright Fellowship to Germany, she now lives in Colorado where she is pursuing her PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.