Janna Plant's mixed genre book (are these diary entries poems or are they stories? are they, in fact, diary entries?) is structured around two fields of metaphor: the refinery and the human body. The awkwardness of the fit between oil refinery and human body is intended; both systems are significant for the processes they engender. The aptly named Plant (version and subversion both of manufacturing) casts doubt on traditional notions of refinement—girl refined into woman into wife into mother—and in so doing gives us a poignant, playful look into adolescence in a Los Angeles oil town.

--Susan M. Schultz

Janna Plant is an alchemist. She unearths the twin elements of humor and despair from their commonplace lodgings in the language, and reconstitutes them as brilliance.

—Anne Kennedy

Janna Plant's book The Refinery reads as a prose poem memoir, giving the reader idiosyncratic portraits of a life of any young women in any U.S. town. Her poems interpret   “any young woman” and her family with caustic humor, pathos, and finely clipped sentences.

—Mary Kasimor

William Carlos Williams might see (that is, hear) this as prose playing the Brevoxyl Blues Saxifrage. The chapbook is a metaphor I've never seen, the girl-to-woman process of refining crude oil. What reader can resist reading (that is, becoming) a diary addressed as Dear gasoline vapors I inhale at the pump, Dear metal rabbit ears, Dear fiery mare that just learned to trust me, Dear paper bag, Dear golden interior lighting of neighborhood houses? However you come out of this, you'll be glad you read Janna Plant.

—Robert Shapard

 

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Born in Santa Monica, raised in Los Angeles, educated on O`ahu, Janna Plant enjoys investigating fictions of coherence, whether they be textual, physical, or identity-related.  She also enjoys toying with the coherence of fiction—testing its boundaries—as she does here, in The Refinery.  Currently working towards an MFA in Writing & Poetics at Naropa University, she has poems forthcoming in Tinfish 19 (Tinfish Press) and Spontaneous Collaborations:  A Statehood Project (Fat Ulu Productions).