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Jennifer K. Dick’s Shelf Break faces oceanic feelings for the ocean itself, in a work forcefully representing the ocean’s and language’s endless motions. Dick produces singularly alliterative and alphabetic appositions, like endless wave upon wave in a plethora of teeming phrases. Her inter-mixed prose passages, with multi-lingual flair, reveal great feelings both for another person and for the fascinations of the marine world. The whole work exclaims Lo! Look! (and Hark! Attend!) down the shelf break into the vastness of submergence and on one’s awestruck “voyage into being.” This is a detail-rich, language-rich impressive work.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of The Complete Drafts
These poems are nautic locutions of proclivity’s perdition, radial drifts beyond grasp yet phosphorescent—turbulent and precise. A majestic reinvention of the manic force of poetry against lyric containment. Jennifer Dick’s collidoscopic verse opens all doors to ear’s mind. Hoi, hoi!
—Charles Bernstein
Through Shelf Break, a linguistic landscape emerges that is both elemental and imaginative, with words as the sometimes-shattered but still-tangible remnant shells of various pasts, as well as the material for an iridescent mosaic of possible shared futures. Here, geology becomes a form of poetry, and Jennifer K. Dick brings a Steinian playfulness and precision with language to a new and necessary articulation of how we, as bodies and as subjects, are inexorably and gloriously composites of whatever matter Earth offers us. In the face of environmental precarity, this translingual, transhistorical poetry challenges each of us to ask how the “thingness of place, substance, lives on within me.”
—Mia You
Jennifer K Dick (from Iowa, USA) is a writer, translator, teacher and visual art aficionado. Her books include That Which I Touch Has No Name (Black Spring Press Group, London, 2022), Lilith: A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt Books, Luxembourg, 2019), Circuits (Corrupt Books, 2013), and Florescence (University of Georgia Press, 2004) as well as seven chap/artbooks. Jennifer has a long connection to text and image work, both as a scholar and practitioner, with, most recently, a text-image work for Inouye Tomoshi shown as part of the “When You Call My Name” show in Canberra, Australia (11-22 Sept, 2025) and a short critical introduction printed alongside a boxed series of original gravures by Japanese Gutai artist Takesada Matsutani (Tandem, Belgium, 2024). Her visual/text installation ‘En-Coding the Urban’ covered the Le Buffet building at the SBB Banhof in Basel in 2016. She curates Ivy Writers Paris bilingual reading series, co-organises the Ecrire l’Art residency for French authors at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d’Art Contemporain—publishing a collection of poetry by selected residents annually—and teaches at the University of Haute Alsace in Mulhouse, France.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 102 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-527-4
$18
