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Red
Jess, Poems by Judith H. Montgomery
Judith
H. Montgomery’s Red Jess is
a book that crackles with the sights and sounds of the world, and their touch
on the heart. The formal sculpting and fluent music of her poems herald an
unusually mature and refined first collection.
Sample Poems by Judith H. Montgomery
“Survivals occur every day, often hard-won, and death grows rather rudely
over-familiar. Montgomery’s poems recognize this and yet miraculously
radiate the possibility of joy. Distilled and precise, yet always on
the verge of complete wildness, the Red Jess poems are ‘blood-lit and
underwrit by bone.’ They move across these pages like ghost horses.”—Nance
Van Winckel, author of Bad Girl with Hawk,
The Dirt, After a Spell, Beside Ourselves
“Judith Montgomery is a fundamentalist of sight. She keeps watch, pays
attention, pores over, scrutinizes, and particularizes. In her meticulous
observation of the hues and textures of the world she manages to pass them
back through the heart. She sees the color, the gleam, and the dazzle. Her
gaze can be sharp and scissoring or it can be expansive and graceful, mortal
and unreasonable. Her language is a lens that sees things in precision and
with exactitude and clarity. She looks the way a ‘phrenologist fingers
the skull to divine the soul.’”—Bruce Smith, author of Mercy
Seat, The Other Lover, Songs for Two Voices
“The poems of Judith Montgomery’s Red
Jess evoke our desire to compose and order the world and, almost simultaneously,
change what we have composed—inevitably unleashing both the forces which
create and those which destroy. Such alteration confronts the knowledge that,
as she writes, ‘everything human/may be used/to save or sever.’
This knowledge prevails throughout the precise elegance of Red
Jess—the world musical and carefully wrought, the world made
more dear by what it admits. Montgomery’s poems embody both the severing
and the necessary descent into the saving grace and vulnerability of passions
that we recognize as everything fallible, everything human.”—Maxine
Scates, author of Toluca Street, Black Loam
Judith H. Montgomery is also the author of Passion,
which received the Defined Providence Chapbook Award, and subsequently the
Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She has received fellowships in poetry from
the Oregon Arts Commission and Literary Arts, and has been a resident at Caldera
and Soapstone. Her poems appear in The Bellingham
Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Comstock Review, Dogwood, The Formalist,
Gulf Coast, High Desert Journal, Margie, The Southern Review, and elsewhere,
as well as in several anthologies. Her work has received the Americas Review,
49th Parallel, National Writers Union, and Chaffin Journal poetry prizes.
She is the 2005-2006 Poet-in-Residence at Central Oregon Community College
in Bend, where she lives. She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Syracuse
University.
ISBN: 1933456175, 96 pages