Seamless and Other Legends
My chapbook, Seamless and Other Legends, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013. It contains many of the poems written in preparation of my master's thesis. It is available on Amazon or through the publisher Finishing Line Press.
Temple’s poems prove her a Penelope of the South who weaves the ties that bind us to place and community against time and space and catastrophe. Her collection plumbs the roots of our gregariousness to “balance on the thinnest appendage” to share in “a joining of like to like” as assuredly as the shuttle of the surf kneads a rock “so perfect it must have tossed for years” to become a comfort we can hold in our palm. This weaver poet, this Arachnid, stitches up our mutual tribulations to build something “we have in common” so that we become “a part / of someone else, / if only for a few hours” tasting that “sweet citrus, the stinging in your lips” of family legend and human connection.— Richard Lyons, prize-winning author of three books of poetry
Jessica Temple’s clear-eyed, unbendingly smart poems reinvent the familiar world—family, the South, tornadoes—through startling, unsentimental imagery, so that places we thought we knew resonate in ways fresh and wonderful. In these poems, the speaker, visiting a winter beach, imagines herself as “paparazzi of seagulls.” A dog, found far from home after a tornado, “must have surfed through the wind.” An anniversary vacation is described with quiet and unexpected beauty: “We listen… / To calliope / And the glassharper / We are at once luxurious and wild / We have eaten and are full.” It is a real treat to be full on Jessica Temple’s rich and lovely poems. Seamless and Other Legends is a wonderful debut.— Catherine Pierce, author of Famous Last Words and The Girls of Peculiar
In this eclectic collection of poems, Jessica Temple shows us how the small details of the world illuminate the large questions. Powerful eyes and ears are at work here. And along with a first-rate imagination, they bring the world into sharp focus.— David Bottoms, former Poet Laureate of Georgia
