In these selected poems, which span Jarnot's 20-year career, she sends the flux of living language crashing into the controlled techniques of form. Her finest explorations include Cubist accretions of data from different angles, as when her speaker observes "that in the field the cows are mooing, that I love things, that they love me back, that the cows all love each other and the daisies." Jarnot is a master of such measured revelation, in no rush to reach a punch line. Other pieces move like the minimalist loops of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Reading the poems’ repeated phrases and reiterations is like listening to Jarnot adjust the tracking of a VHS tape’s misaligned image, zeroing in to achieve perfect focus. Once located, the result is devastating and pristine, as when she pictures a pastoral scene of “deer legs upturned in the snow, / wind-blown cow fur, grass fresh mown,” and describes a pelagic view of “multitudinous seas incarnadine.” This compilation includes the best of Jarnot’s Whitmanesque reflections and Ginsbergian outcries, speech acts that list always toward an avant-garde.— Diego Báez

"For 20 years, Jarnot has refused to limit her sense of the poetic to language and line. Her ideas meddle in the traditions of form, medium, sound, and arrangement to recall the modernism of Joyce and Stein: 'in the spring, where on an uninhibited/ island I strangled all the shepherd girls and/ became a smallish book.' This selected highlights her inventiveness. Get to know Jarnot."