How to Live on Bread and Music
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Winner of the 2009 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets
“Jennifer Sweeney is one of the best young poets writing today, one other young poets should study as an example of the heights to which well-crafted image and form can take their own writing.” —The Pedestal Magazine [read the full review]
“Jennifer K. Sweeney’s How to Live on Bread and Music is a remarkable achievement from the hand of a poet with a subtle and compassionate mindfulness. These are poems that tell us we move forward in moments when motion seems all too risky and stillness all too intolerable. Adept at the delicate project of inventiveness in the line, she shows us time and again that language is the matter of the poet and that there is surprise in the gift, as this book is sure evidence of the gift.” — Afaa Michael Weaver, James Laughlin Award judge. See www.poets.org for more information about the prize.
“Each of Jennifer K. Sweeney’s poems is part of her quest to be fully alive to the beauty, terror, and wonder of living. ‘Oh life with your falling open, / April is eating itself alive / and I can hear the splitting of the dahlias / when I sleep.’ Rich in sound patterns, imagery, and metaphor, and packed with surprise, these poems take special joy in wild and juicy words: for example, ‘lyrate,’ ‘paldrons,’ ‘guillotine/ of wind’ ‘the sloop and slag of childhood,’ ‘deckled,’ and ‘lantern-hearted.’ Enter Sweeney’s world, and perhaps you too will become lantern-hearted.”
—Annie Boutelle
“In Jennifer K. Sweeney’s How to Live on Bread and Music we discover words that weigh the earth carefully and sing it into existence for this poet knows ‘song is the yeast / when the body wants.’ Her poetry is ‘pained with sensation’ and has the power to transform the reader, to resurrect dandelions from a field of armor.”
—Mark Irwin
Nocturne
There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician
who plays a harp without strings.
The city has one chair
where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
A lone streetlamp casts
a blue arc of light.
A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.
The world filters through
his empty frame as he plucks the air.
Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don't.
That is the choice we are always making.
About the Author
Jennifer K. Sweeney’s first book of poems, Salt Memory, won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard, Spoon River and \ North where she won the 2009 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She was awarded a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and a residency from Hedgebrook. Sweeney holds an MFA from Vermont College and serves as assistant editor for DMQ Review. After living in San Francisco for twelve years, she currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney.