Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

​

"In Molberg’s harrowing new collection, the witness of documentary poetry meets the fearlessness of the confessional mode. What results is a book of powerful testimony. Often allegorical, these poems are yet firmly rooted in the ‘real things that happen.’ In poem after poem, Molberg testifies to the innumerable ways the justice system fails women, 'pulling the truth from the dark.'"

 

—Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

 

 

"Jenny Molberg’s The Court of No Record questions our fascination of violence—specifically violence against women—and our woefully inadequate and misogynist response to it. Dead, abused, or threatened women (the stuff of so much of our detective/thriller entertainment) are given voice in these fearless poems. Back stories ('I loved him in my dumb way' and 'We know why she lies. We lied for him too' and 'I say aloud/ to no one, I am going to be fine') give way to terror. Molberg takes ugly truths and makes something beautiful but never in service of amusement or spectacle.  This is gorgeous poetry of witness, of social and political examination, of deep intelligence and of a valiant heart."

​

—Denise Duhamel, author of Scald

​

 

"In The Court of No Record, Jenny Molberg takes us on a Dantesque journey through the infernal landscapes of toxic masculinity, intimate partner violence, and legal chicanery as the speaker’s poems are used as evidence against her: “my voice is animal in the courtroom microphone.” Immersing us in the dissociative psychic experience of partner abuse, Molberg ultimately draws herself and us up from the drowning—from victim to survivor to self-proclaimed 'bitch'—no longer 'too afraid to see that I have always been brave.'"

 

—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps