Spilled and Gone

In Spilled and Gone, her new collection of poems, Jessica Greenbaum envisions a Brooklyn that is real and a Brooklyn that is everywhere. She achieves this by a brilliant use of metaphor: her seagulls ‘wheel like immigrating thoughts,’ and a half-moon at dawn is ‘stuck like a dime in the coin slot.’ So, too, her exuberant odes to a potato masher and a stovetop espresso maker raise those mundane objects until they rise off the page, Whatever she entertains -- a storm-struck tree, an outdoor concert, her immigrant grandparents, a food truck in Grand Army Plaza -- her subject is enlivened by keen observation, a fresh mind, and a vivid sense of place that makes me want to be there, with her, in her world.

-- Grace Schulman

Jessica's Greenbaum's poetry has the joie de vivre of New York School poetics, tempered by the griefs and reflectiveness of an experientially tested soul. Confident in craft, substantial of heart, Spilled and Gone is the dexterous voice of a poet calling out to her earthly company of people and things, claiming and praising them. When I read it, I feel myself open and relax into the world.

-- Tony Hoagland

In her stunning new collection Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum transcends the limits of ordinary experiences, making of them indelible moments of human boundedness. We feel ourselves breaking in each heartrending line here, as houses crash down next door and lupines are all we have left – and when it seems our very souls might leak away, we are ultimately repaired by the poet's abiding faith in life and love, like ‘the trees/themselves, how we depend on them to keep standing around us.’ Such is the astonishing healing power of Greenbaum's poetry, to admit freely our impermanence, and yet always to restore us.

-- Rafael C