JENNY
MOLBERG

“Jenny Molberg’s The Medium explores, but never simplifies, the layered intertextualities of women’s art, aesthetics, biography, and autobiography, while staying true to the ‘constant private noise’ of poetry’s lyric core. The collection’s rare intellectual breadth does not quash the concentrated intimacies of each individual poem. Elaine de Kooning is both a concrete and allegorical presence in the poems, representative and real. She is a medium, a sieve, an image, an interpreter, and a parallel to the brokenness, brilliance, embodiment, and imposed invisibility of Molberg’s grandmother Sue, ‘[h]er hair like a pillow of smoke’; women artists of the twentieth century, several of whom are represented here; and the ever-fierce art monster, Molberg herself, ‘watery at the edges . . . a kind / of wholeness or perspective,’ who frames the art with formal and imaginative magnificence.”

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—Diane Seuss