Links, Updates, and Selected Works of Jenne Kaivo

Goodreads Book Giveaway Poems Mostly of the Sea by Jenne Kaivo Giveaway ends October 06, 2019. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway I've started a Kindle giveaway for 100 free copies of PMotS! The hardcopy giveaway ended yesterday, with 10 winners, but I forgot to post it here. 1,209 people signed up anyway, so that went pretty well.

Anglerfish From its very beginning life has been tenacious even where the sun that sustains is away. Death creates life and life is voracious. We should all take a note from the patience of anglerfish, with their teeth and their twinkling lights. There are soggy rock places without any lights where long pillars grow because the tenacious water drips down as unstopping as anglerfish. You can erode but you can't take away. A cave may be hidden but never forgotten: it will be revealed, because life is voracious and the river that eats through the rock is voracious like the empty-gut cores of the heavenly lights. Two atoms merge, burst in pain, are forgotten but not without purpose, because their tenacious deathsongs light worlds that are deathsongs away. In the distance, they look just like anglerfish. When I am asleep I have jaws like an anglerfish lined with spike fangs, and I'm dull and voracious, like my slimy-fish past which will not go away. ...

This was published in Arsenic Lobster, and is included in Poems Mostly of the Sea: Eyes Unastounding Who cried in the hall as I walked On the rug that looped tight as a noose? Who was it, and why Could not I have stopped? Long over, I’ve bypassed the door. Long gone, though the brakes on the hill Caterwaul and deprive me of sleep. I demand that I sleep. I demand as I still live, I do as I please. I demand if you kill me, You take me outside of the town. Do it far as can be from the center of town. Eyes overwhelming Stare down through the cracks in the Ceiling I’m under. I hope most of all I may sleep. Eyes unastounding Are fastened on me in the Street, I am freakish. That now matters little to me. Eyes in the mirror, The worst of them all, remind Me of eyes in the Ceiling I’m under. And these eyes deprive me of sleep.