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THE NIGHT BEFORE THE DAY ON WHICH

by Jean Day

Jean Day's new trilogy of poems opens with an "antipolemic” that disputes and disrupts violent dialectics embrangling our national mood. Addressing the women’s marches of 2016, the poet gives us what-for. Different interests are on the move, strategizing across a partisan battlefield. Day cuts through the bullshit with blistering empathy and clear-headedness: “We don’t need to know everything/but here we are and/so moved.” These are invitations to and directions for a life of action. Day is a poet who gets out of her seat! This is a fresh perspective full of clarity and wisdom.

Jean Day has been an admired presence in the avant-garde landscape for decades. In 1988, her first Roof title heralded the arrival of a scrappy initiate to the scene (A Young Recruit). Now Day is at the top of her game, becoming a "Secret Agent,” sweeping across the US on a noir-tinged cross-country road trip. We all feel that “The bomb went off a little too soon” and are left contemplating the rubble. In lieu of a clear itinerary, the poems offer instances of shimmer in the continuous present. Threads of story, macro and mini, form the warp for the book's overall texture. The sound of resistance, the urgency of movement, and the flowering of detail are the book's matter and material. Lyric is its shape.

The Day Before the Night on Which concludes with a meditation on mourning, to the tune of Prince. “Life is not a lesson./And these are not my tears.” The poet flirts with the death drive before driving off in a used car. She asserts it’s no surprise that “When the polar ice melts/the bears come into town/so hungry." Day warns, “The ground we stand upon [...] stands back.” She demands “less rain, more appreciation” while cultivating her own unique “female difficulty” that’s captivating and weird. Her work is replete with “repose, reverse, then overflow”; it’s brand new yet hauntingly familiar. Welcome reader, and let’s move: “I’ve been expecting you.”

People Are Saying:

The linked poems in Jean Day’s The Night Before the Day on Which are a road trip through an America and Americana gone haywire. This book is a figurative visit to the parched Badlands of the 21st century where “We’ve watched/so many crop shows come and go/we know the drill until the droop…” Day nails the zeitgeist in surprising ways again and again—no easy feat! Even in dystopia there is the thrill of recognition.
– Rae Armantrout

In a late-capitalist arena of shady oracles (near, perhaps, that other oracle arena), a dryly pagan voice is reminding us that our beastly nature holds the key to free us. Hilarious, prophetic, empathetic and dark, it is an I that turns into a we as it locates our place in the mess. “For everything inside the egg is personal” and pigeons are (of course) doves. In these three brilliant serial poems, “the body is full of notes;” the sun, “a bright muscle” nevertheless “is out only briefly.” Jean Day calls the cops robbers, she speaks in lyrical “two-fisted apostasy.” You will want to listen close and return.
– Jason Morris

This is an elegant, barbed book, a triptych of poems unspooling in an unstoppable stream, a swirl of world and word, “the halves can’t be halved any halfer.” Read them as pleasure pieces, pillars undermined from all sides. Or as solidly vertical sarcophagi, including all that’s offered up and withheld, according to the poet from a perch deep within. Read “. . . on the shore of an enormous lake // whose pebbles sough” to mean us, among the enabling objects delivering a whisper from the forces passing through. A clear peel making sense, even love, and the empathic projection of all onto all, “my monad,” all the points of the songs.
– Diane Ward

About the Author:

Jean Day is a poet, academic editor, and union activist who has been involved in the Bay Area poetry scene for four decades. After 14 years with Small Press Distribution, she made a career in academic publishing. She is the author of many collections of poetry, including Late Human, The Triumph of Life, and Daydream. She lives in Berkeley.