Contemporary Authors

• My Enemies ( poems) Song Cave (Northampton, MA), 2013
• Yeah No ( poems) Song Cave (Brooklyn, NY), 2018

1. My enemies https://lccn.loc.gov/2014434175 Gregory, Jane, 1981- author. Poems. Selections My enemies / Jane Gregory. First edition. [Northampton, MA] : The Song Cave, [2013] vii, 75, [4] pages : illustrations ; 19 cm PS3607.R48874 A6 2013 ISBN: 9780988464315 (pbk.)0988464314 (pbk.) 2. Yeah no https://lccn.loc.gov/2018930687 Gregory, Jane. Yeah no / Jane Gregory. Brooklyn, NY : Song Cave, 2018. pages cm ISBN: 97809988290290998829021

• Company Editions - https://companyeditions.com/jane-gregory-bio/

  Jane Gregory is from Tucson and now lives in California. Her first book, My Enemies, was published by The Song Cave.

• Nion Editions - https://www.nioneditions.org/about/

  co-founder & co-editor
  Jane Gregory

  Jane Gregory is from Tucson, Arizona and lives in Oakland, California. Her first book of poems, My Enemies, was published by The Song Cave in 2013 and her second, YEAH NO, is forthcoming next spring, also from The Song Cave. She has an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is finishing her PhD in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, where she co-curates the Holloway Series and works for the Mixed Blood Project.

QUOTED: "stunning and sparse moments of elegy and ode."
"Gregory's probing and demanding collection grows more rewarding with each subsequent read."

Yeah No
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p53. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Yeah No
Jane Gregory.The Song Cave, $17.95 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-0-9988290-2-9
"I think things are, weird," writes Gregory (My Enemies) in a line that stands as an apt summation of her startling second collection. Here, punctuation and enjambment jolt expected rhythms, and the simplicity of the language rasps against the complexity of the thoughts. Of the book's 31 poems, 22 are titled some variation of the word "Profices," from the Latin proficio, and the collection's title announces an inquisition into notions of progress. What, exactly, could the phrase yeah no be said to mean? Is it self-negation or something new? Is it a commentary on how social and technological progress continually dis--and re-orients people in language? "Everything is a pattern/ of yesses and no," Gregory writes in an appropriately cryptic response to would-be interlocutors. Gregory has no desire to adhere to conventions of language, tickling readers with deliberate misspellings throughout ("vortexx," "sur-vivre," "lifht") as a reminder that nothing is stable. Her exacting linguistic imprecision gets mirrored in the formal play, which grows more expansive and jarring as the collection advances. She also unexpectedly drops in stunning and sparse moments of elegy and ode: "no offense will love what I defend// even unknown// to me//1 will care for you." Gregory's probing and demanding collection grows more rewarding with each subsequent read. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Yeah No." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 53. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357507/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=17eb000e. Accessed 31 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357507

"Yeah No." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 53. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357507/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=17eb000e. Accessed 31 May 2018.

• Poetry Foundation
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/10/made-close-by-jane-gregorys-my-enemies
  Word count: 562

  Poetry News
  Made Close by Jane Gregory's My Enemies
  By Harriet Staff

  jane gregory

  Jane Gregory's new (first) book, My Enemies (The Song Cave 2013), is given a close-read by Charles Altieri, writing for Feedback (the critical theory blog-arm of Open Humanities Press). "Reading Gregory becomes an object lesson in how our language itself mimes (or perhaps creates) our fundamental confusions about what we can control and what controls us."

  To think of a book is to think about possible dialogue between author and reader. To think of a book you will not write is to confuse author and reader, since one must justify this “decision” through internal dialogue. For Gregory this dialogue gets quite complex: the proposed reader of this non-book takes on intense imaginative reality just because that person will only exist in the imagination, sharing the needs of the author who also dwells on imaginary powers that may afford the poem’s deepest sense of reality. I love three aspects of this poem. First there is the extraordinarily intricate enjambment that I suspect is based on a syllabic count, but I do not understand the principles involved. What I do recognize here is the terrific pressure on monosyllables as building blocks of the line and the language. It is as if “the book I will not write” permits control over the language on a more elemental level than if one were trying to write the book. For then one would be locked into self-protection and fear of judgment. And perhaps monosyllables are the only way to avoid how syllables combine to become my enemies. Then there is the internal semantic sequence in the first half of the poem, where what narrative the situation allows is built on the transferential power of repeated simple operatives (like “music,” “ears,” and especially versions of “make”) to enact the strangely generous yet aggressive stance the poem takes toward “you.” No more saccharine second persons, and so no more hiding of the self-division inherent in the imaginative effort it takes for “I” to work out the dependencies that make it so wary of that second person.

  Finally there is the imaginative scope and freshness and complexity of this last sentence. What is the benefit of leaving this book “and going on to look like what you have been through, rather than what you are in”? I suspect that to look like what you are in, when this poem is imposed upon you (making the author a monster), would be to change appearances constantly. When you are in the poem I will not write, you have no recourse to any separate or stable identity—ever. You are only a figment of my imagination that I want to reject. (What a great way to imagine punishing others, although it also involves punishing the self by dwelling in what will give no substance in actual accomplishment!) But looking like what one has been through is a badge of accomplishment. The past now gives substance to the self. And more importantly, the self would emerge in real time, perhaps capable of developing her own intentions to write a book actually coming to terms with its vulnerabilities (and aggressions toward this author).

  Share its other senses of entanglement.
  Originally Published: October 22nd, 2013
  Quick Tags

• Sink
  http://sinkreview.org/reviews/jane-gregory-my-enemies.html
  Word count: 989

  QUOTED: "Poetry can be perfectly at home on the page of the poet with no need to go beyond there. However, using poetry to explore communication and relationships within language is what poetry is about and Gregory is fantastic explorer here in her first book. She uses the breakdowns and arbitrary constructions of language to show us how these definitions are created and contextualized and that, to me at least, is what good codesmithing in poetry is about."

  Jane Gregory
  My Enemies
  The Song Cave
  reviewed by Amish Trivedi
  The Song Cave, 2013

  I’m always interested in negatives. In the case of Jane Gregory’s My Enemies, she gives me one repeatedly which I cannot escape when discussing her book: “Book I Will Not Write.” It appears as a title ten times, and the poems anchor the book as a whole, the point on the wheel as it comes back around. “This book is also a test to determine if we can go on communicating.” This is not the book she has written, however: it’s the mirror book living in another world seemingly behind us, but invisible when we turn to look.

  We will not go on communicating. Words don’t fit together the same way they do in real life: they are broken, splayed out for us like vivisection meant to show us how language works while still alive. And it is alive: Gregory’s language isn’t lofty or highfalutin in any way, but is still unexpected. By this I mean that words you know are used, but they aren’t used exactly when or where you expect them. Check out the first sentence of “Stupid/Sun”:

  At the cross-bow take aim at the fox-glove, how far it isn’t from compel to repulse.

  You know all those words, but read it aloud to yourself: it doesn’t fit the way you want it to fit together. The grammar is purposely loose, “at the cross-bow” becoming a location where bad things happen at the start of the poem versus something like being “at the piano.” The whole poem then builds from here in the same stilted tone. “Goodnight the arena of the forum of my mind” begins another sentence but, like the one above, it ends with a compelling thought: “that can’t tell the difference between image and idea, makes one thing of face and shield.” That’s quite the anchor, the inability to separate the activities of the brain and it leads, like so many of the pages of the book, to a feeling of shift. Not quite a shift of paradigms— the world is not a different place— but maybe within the world of the book that’s pretty accurate.

  We will not communicate through faith. “Faith” is a word that appears in titles several times throughout the book, but it is lacking. Rather, it’s not that it’s supposed to be there and isn’t: it was never meant to be. Faith is something that happens because what’s lacking is tactility, but in a poem like “Beyond the Studio on the Corner of Faith and East Fourth,” tactility comes into question:

  Sometimes you think—

  listen
  what happened

  —you are only your hands

  and you say warm us.
  You say fear

  is fear

  and I am an animal.

  Fear, like faith, is an untouchable emotion but unlike faith, the object of fear can be very real and become tangible very quickly. Also, the two columns play interestingly together. The first two lines on the right side don’t necessarily read together between the two m-dashes. “Is fear,” however, shows us how faith is an emotion of higher beings and the speaker here casts it aside and accepts fear because it is basic.

  Gregory plows through forms, almost like Joe Pesci’s Vinnie announcing that he’s done with the next witness. She kills them. She gives us a block of text and beats us with it, giving us no pause or moment to settle into. The breath and body have no space in which to contextualize what she’s saying, only to absorb it and save it for later consideration. There are other times where the text scatters across the page, like buckshot, hitting all edges of the eyes and pulling them around. The benefit of this is the eye never leads us to boredom- the reader is always forced to restart each poem/section with a fresh method of attack. Some poets easily settle into a system but Gregory never does.

  One of the finest attributes of this book is, for its density, one never gets bogged down reading. Even if it takes multiple sittings to read, it’s not because it drags but because it creates a challenge for the reader. I like a good challenge. I like to feel like I’ve gone through something and come out slightly different at the end of it but that the world around me is still basically the same.

  The trouble of communication is a good one to explore through poetry. Poetry, being that it uses language, allows us the basic structure of communication but, ultimately, is a form that does not need communicating. Poetry can be perfectly at home on the page of the poet with no need to go beyond there. However, using poetry to explore communication and relationships within language is what poetry is about and Gregory is fantastic explorer here in her first book. She uses the breakdowns and arbitrary constructions of language to show us how these definitions are created and contextualized and that, to me at least, is what good codesmithing in poetry is about.

• Michigan Quarterly Review
  http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2018/03/notes-toward-jane-gregorys-yeah-no/
  Word count: 1986

  QUOTED: "The poems express the space between the world and the thought, that between the thought and the person, the person and the feeling. ... The poems enact a beginning, one that is already foreclosed in an end, and within that circularity or polarity, we find a self enfolding in articulation."

  Notes toward Jane Gregory’s “Yeah No”
  by Ryo Yamaguchi
  Mar 14, 2018
  in Book Review

  I want to think about distance and Jane Gregory’s new book of poems, Yeah No (The Song Cave, 2018). Or something more like gapping. A space between concepts charged with those concepts’ distance, what holds discourse together (and molecules, and planets). I think, reading these poems, that the poems express the space between the world and the thought, that between the thought and the person, the person and the feeling.

  I think the poems enact a beginning, one that is already foreclosed in an end, and within that circularity or polarity, we find a self enfolding in articulation. But I can only think toward these thoughts, and that feels about right, that the poems themselves can only think toward them. I hope you will receive this as notes toward that thinking, that thinking toward these thoughts.

  PROFICES [The world’s terrific]

  *

  That it goes from all
  shall be well to oh
  well

  Knock knock

  Everything is a pattern
  of yesses and no

  That’s page one. The world is terrific as we have begun within it? No? Yes? This is the pattern, and here is both the textual staging that Gregory employs throughout, as well as the primary cycle that will name it, the “profices.” Here is also the orientation of the self, which is, I think, the poet. I want to call it: a priori absurdist critical discourse (and the poem therein, or around). The vapid reassurance (all shall be well) flashes into instant resignation (oh well).

  The book begins with a shrug, and then it becomes a gag. “Knock knock” is: the arrival, the joke, the utterance, the unsignifying tautology. It foretells the wordplay and the electrostatic charge of the name (who’s there? Who?). But there is a tiny head that gives this all animation: no. Not nos (like the yesses). Just no.

  PROFICES [yeah no]

  *

  For the remainder give
  us not your nothing
  at the core of it, nor
  your spiral unfurled re-
  vealing horizontal space,
  a blanket.

  That’s page fifty-three. Not your nothing at the core of it. The negativa flourishes. It is its own intelligence, a bending of gyri and sulci. Let’s talk about “[yeah no].” What do you hear first? Surely it is the nervy refusal, with its teenager’s insolence and condescension, its palm to the face, its saying also “I don’t think so” (and look at that, the negativa again, the not-thinking thought). Can I speak for us all? Is this not where we are politically? Is this not the protest we are arrived at, that to which we say no so ridiculous in its claim that we can’t help but huff?

  But “[yeah no]” (the brackets are: the sotto voce? The aside? The palimpsest, the trace?) is also binary, it is “yes no,” it is “Sic et Non,” and I wonder so very much how much Gregory was pointing toward this crucial early beginning (from all the way over here in the “remainder”) of a kind of modern discourse bound in contradiction, assertion and negation, the modern dialectic that attempts to spin with the energy of language’s proliferate significations, what I think we all hope we are saying when we say the word “irony.”

  “PROFICES” is: prophesies, offices, proffers, official, professional, proficiencies, orifices, feces?

  yay, so toil, smart women be mean, my brain, refuse all work that makes more for others
  my brain, obstinate failure of thought to escape itself, i am, bearable self, begun by the light
  of the sky we are driven against, the sky, under which
  each committee covers his feet in my house
  each committee comes to cover his feet in my house

  Here in this poem begun by the light (of the sky we are driven against) but also the maxim: yay, to toil, to make not (more work? More profit?) for others. Be mean (the mean?). This is the beginning within ethics, and that within the social — the speaker to her populace (smart women), and yet also the speaker put upon by the officialdom of the They, who transgress the private domus to cover/anoint themselves (is this lodging? Is this the washing of feet?).

  Does the human begin in labor, which is then corrupted by bureaucracy (is the bureaucracy both singular and plural?)? What happens in the space between (going backward now) bureaucracy, labor, the obstinate failure of thought to escape itself (a thought can only think itself?), and the “i am,” which is born (bearable)? What happens in the space between each of these lines in their succession (the space that the poem has put there along with the lines)?

  What about the sky? Does it howl?

  Like what [/ well that]

  we are [as] makes sense like each
  to their users and what
  else not to be overcome

  Though here must be a bad vortexx
  said everyone of where they find themselves
  since everything

  The poet (Jane Gregory) here, elsewhere, throughout: the conceptual contortionist, touching opposites or the bulbous ends of blank categories (what, that, everyone, everything), making of that touching a trajectory toward description. This is a pointing at the self as it goes outside itself, the sense-making (makeable) that singles us, makes us each our own (who am I, am I everyone?). Here again Gregory with an elemental sociality (maybe we call this “difference”), and here again our definition in labor, us as users (makers) of sense, and as that laborer also asking after the “what else,” what is “not to be.”

  (But it is the being overcome. Not not to be but not to be overcome.) Stand tall?

  But it is the bad vortexx and the already, the “since everything,” which is where we find ourselves. I was born and there was already everything? Doesn’t it seem so as such, here in late history, with possibility exhausted (so it so often seems)?

  We are always living after the “since.”

  To what belong the concepts I stop caring

  because reason’d produced some excesses,
  such as, some sense, so easily

  it could have been otherwise, everything, and why
  are they only thinking all of my thoughts for me, existing, and how

  is it for them to know that I would not regard myself
  in any way, were not other people, harmed.

  Woe reason’s excesses, especially that which asks after what could have been otherwise. What is the gap between what is and is not? What is the gap between me and the thinking of my thoughts? Who among us (who among us is me?) feels the rebuke, history as a rearing up of the inevitable and that is, maybe, an assertion against our excesses of reason (the Tree of Knowledge?)? I think in these lines that we have thought too well and the result (our punishment?) is that the thinking goes on without us (who is the “they”? the They?).

  The concepts do not belong to us but we to the concepts. Does the poem suggest that we lose ourselves, our ability to regard ourselves, in this excess of reason? Do we all think the same thinking, does our collective think for us and thereby exist for us? Does it do our existing? Is it really only by harm to the others that I can regard myself? Or is it instead that I would not regard myself — being not the others — as harmed, that I am the only one free from harm? Or more generally, what to do with how this all occurs, as in this stanza, between care and harm?

  Neither is it like my articular lerb
  towards desire, whose hurl gives back

  to the desire I have given you to give back to. Now
  something should redden, there should be put

  some flame to end the fire with, some blood
  in The Hotel where I am fucking this

  to travel with you. . . .

  I want to talk about the spirit. I want to say that the poems locate the subject as true within the spirit. It gives us something to grab (to give back?). Not the “i am” or the thoughts thinking themselves (the They thinking the thoughts) but the “I” as it gives and takes with the “you.” As it hurls, as it is towards desire (the desire). The volley is something. What is the volley, the “given you to give back to,” and what does it do with the gap? Does it overcome? Does it give us each our eachness and also our togetherness together the both? From this spirit and its volley we arrive at the “should,” not born already in ethics but determining it ourselves (I and you, not the They)—directing it, pointing it toward somewhere specific. Something should redden — blood in our bodies coming to the surface of our skin, or heat as in both fire and flame, or the descending day, or even the correction, the corrective mark. Is our spirit red?

  And what is the flame that is not the fire (“fight fire with fire,” here and elsewhere, turns of phrase and refrains and little melodies echoed (as you see what immediately follows, the famous hotel (Hotel) with the blood in it))? And I hear “put,” to put, as in “put in place.” I sympathize. Where and when we are, I want to end the fire, too. I want to put in place the end. Does the poem see the great end, does it fantasize about it, burning it all down, even the fire itself? I can sympathize. My blood sympathizes.

  And the “fuck,” the “fucking this.” Fucking this up? Fucking this over? Or just fucking, like what we do in hotels, especially those with blood in them? Is “fucking” the great end, the emancipation and thereafter the “traveling with you”? The union that is the great end, the erasure? Is it the spirit in purity?

  Time existed to keep everything
  from happening at once

  and was running out, so
  everything clamored to happen

  at the cost of what was happening.

  What do I want to talk about? The happening? Do I want to talk about cost? Time is running out. This is the nature of Gregory’s gaps: simultaneity. These are poems of the late confusion and the self (the spirit of the feeling) finding itself within it, within the clamorousness of the everything happening. Confusion is rich to sustain. It is, maybe, a baptism. And to think of time is to think of order but then, as we have seen, we are at the end of time and so at the end of order (time existed—we are in time’s excesses). Is this the place from which these poems speak? “Bye Bye / Bye Bye love / Bye Bye consciousness” — that’s the last page. Another song echoes; it is a trace of what we have shared in.

• 4 Square Review
  https://www.4squarereview.com/yeah-no-by-jane-gregory/
  Word count: 2520

  QUOTED: "Beginning with poems that read as incremental gestures toward clarity, YEAH NO slowly shucks the detritus of answering and begins to dwell, via longer and more linguistically-concise poems, in the post-answer world of statement—statement as lucidity, as directive, as a landing place for thought."
  "Gregory repeatedly calls attention to the unbalanced in YEAH NO, and balances us in doing so. But this is also a sign that we cannot be tricked, even when Gregory’s speaker presents to tell us what the book is about. For it is adorned with no’s and nots and uns but we are with it, in our own understanding, regardless of how we’ve been called to claim our understandings."
  "Lines where Gregory is swift and smart to enlist a speaker who knows not to pretend whole truth, not to pretend to have mended to our otherwise, and thus go out with them, reader, go window."

  Reviewed by tyler flynn dorhoLt

  In YEAH NO, Jane Gregory’s second book of poems from The Song Cave, the poet directs us to a place where impulse is often confounded by truth. The poems ask us to consider how yes and no come to be and how language can, or cannot, accurately plate them. Beginning with poems that read as incremental gestures toward clarity, YEAH NO slowly shucks the detritus of answering and begins to dwell, via longer and more linguistically-concise poems, in the post-answer world of statement—statement as lucidity, as directive, as a landing place for thought:

  Not to know but to go

  on / Given up to throw off

  this bidding and its bleak stuff

  with which [the] [S]pace is

  turbid, by which this

  space is chosen

  (“PROFICES,” 76)

  Though this poem arrives later in the book, it signals how ideas often get going—get going fast—and how the impulse to speak and act upon them is often the thriving antidote to their leavening density. However, density does not always foam into complexity; the poems in YEAH NO also settle themselves down, and the titles are the markers for what it means to cautiously churn within an ongoingness—of sense-making and language and body.

  The majority of the poems in YEAH NO are titled “PROFICES.” Think of the phrase “yeah no.” Now place a comma after yeah. With a comma, we enter the tone-bending saying, “Yeah, I hear what you’re saying but no, I just can’t.” Or perhaps something like, “here is an affirmation of your (person I’m conversing with) statement or belief (just to please you, converser) but no, I actually do not agree with your sentiment or belief and because I first said yeah, it ought to be a big sign, now that I’m saying no, that you’re, like, completely off track.”

  In other words, to know what another person might be saying or doing, even if what he or she is saying or doing is not, well, right (logically, ethically, etc.), is the space of the yeah-with-a-comma-no; and so what, then, is the space of the yeah-without-a-comma-no? Is it a defiant one? Are we to read, when yeah and no are together, and without punctuation, a purity in negation, an open place to proceed in harmonious dichotomy?

  Fortunately, Gregory lets us in on the first page of YEAH NO, at the end of the first of the “PROFICES” poems, with the line “everything is a pattern / of yesses and no.” But how much of an “in” is this? And do we need an in? For instance, why a pattern of more than one yes and just one no? Is it that there can often be many yesses before any one no, and the no thus wipes out all the yesses? Or, resoundingly, does a No, give way to a Yes?

  I digress, but in digressing I am spun back around to where I started when I began to digress. The pattern is the important part here, and in Gregory’s poems it is especially important to understand that digressions are just as much patterns (even a method) as that which we find to be obvious patterns; and the key to reading and experiencing these poems is to hear them out by allowing them to build; they begin with increments and refract into fullness. Where they build to is less essential than the fact that they do build. Not toward finality but toward, and eventually with, movement. At once acutely aural, the poems in YEAH NO are also cleverly visual, and that is how they begin, and continue, to captivate, to force us to establish an understanding for what and how we say yes and no, to ourselves and then to our actions and the language with which we control our actions.

  To stay what is a way [drooled] against

  nothing, or a way to say

  nothing over and over, different ways

  [“PROFICES,” 68]

  And so why Profices? Though it is not an actual word, when it is said out loud (and if you listen to how delicately and assuredly Gregory says it, specifically in the first, charming audio book from The Song Cave) you’ll hear the word prophecies. Yes, this could be one way to read the work—as oracular—but if so, we must do so in terms of how a certain idea or feeling becomes no or yes (side note: listening to the audio book is its own separate delight, and Gregory reads it from somewhat of an oracular lilt, a sussurant but controlled glide). Additionally, I am sure many readers will want to make the leap toward the Latin word prōficio, a compound of the words “make” and “construct,” a word that calls attention to making progress or advancing or contributing or benefiting; yet Gregory’s choice not to use prōficio(there are intentional misspellings, or alternative spellings to many other words in this book), is a way to toy with how, regardless of our yes or no stances, we still ascribe meaning to what is close to us, especially in spelling and sound. We say yes and no to meaning. We attach meaning to non-meaning, and what is a matter with a letter, a misplaced one, if the word sounds similar to, or the same as, what we know… know to mean? Is nothing a matter then? We’ve heard our own sense, haven’t we?

  Let us turn to a poem, in this case the entire page 10, itself the third page in one of the early “PROFICES:”

  Like what [/ well that]

  we are [as] makes sense like each

  to their users and what

  else not to be overcome

  Though here must be a bad vortexx

  said everyone of where they find themselves

  since everything

  Since every known thing

  only occurs to me each thing occurs

  not to overcome what is else but

  Hey Everything [Hey Everything takes]

  takes great effort

  The right justified and bracketed phrases (in the book, these are in fainter text), act as both refrains and extractions—troweling chants, perhaps. This is the pattern of the yeah-no in action. This is sway; a way of alerting us of the vast and melodious space between certainties; or of the confined and agitated dwellings amidst agitation (listening to the audio book can help readers find out which kind of sway). Secondly, the absence of punctuation, coupled with the choice to capitalize words like “Everything” and misspell vortex (“Though here must be a bad vortexx”), invite the readers to adjust their internal megaphones and make the poem a sound, and yet Gregory still drives the poem with a kind of low-ride precision, in that the space she gives the poem, on the page, and in the gaps (look at that lingering “overcome”!), keep the poem at eye-level, swaying but laid-back. It is magical, therefore, that a poem operating on this many sonic and visual levels still strides with plainspeak—“since everything / Since every known thing.” There is comedy in this stride. The volume goes up on “every known thing” and “Hey Everything” and not just because they’re repeated. It is because they have weeded out then tumbled forth their preceding tones. They’ve been forced to repeat and add on as they repeat, each addition an inch more toward truth.

  And so where is this weeding out? In a sense, a yes needs an opposite force and often it cannot just be no. It sometimes must be un. There is a force in un not so easily found in no—whereas no seems independent, a sharp finality, un is a stripping away—and the voice in Gregory’s poems executes from the un—“No, I am the unlimiter, untimelier” (19)—and with this execution establishes a new way to unravel meaning. A new way to UNderstand. Whereas no deletes, erases, omits what preceded it, the space of UN often restores meaning and validity. By stripping away, it admits to its attempt at regaining some of the force of a word and idea that is needed to get on, to get going. Just as much as Gregory uses un in YEAH NO to retrieve the negated—words that get play early on are unhurt, unend, unlatch, unlimit, unearth, uninvaded—there is something equally as restorative in how you cannot have unit, understanding, the unknown, an underworld, or a universe, without UN. The poems are aware of this and they proclaim it.

  I keep telling myself, hey, man, you’re reading way too far into this, or way far away from it, but I feel as though, and in order to let the poems tell me what they’re doing, I must welcome Gregory’s more slippery asides—I must accept the sway—and what the poems are thus doing is addressing the air between the thing and the things that get said about the thing. This is a way of not pretending to know or be truth, in language, but to trudge toward it:

  This is a book of greetings because its source experiences everything as a confrontation that must be recognized to first face then evade.

  Is to face something, in recognizing it, a way of saying yeah? Is to evade a way of saying no? This passage reads as the way of the UN, and Gregory meticulously continues to address this part of the parts:

  “and if you can see the whole immediately it’s a problem”

  And again on 35:

  “Every con

  cept’s a spell

  to will its / own exception”

  This is when, and how, readers will return to the title, “PROFICES.” If Gregory begins in a made-up space, there is no immediate need to accept sense, at least as attached to any one thing or to truth, but Gregory still has to tether the world of the book to sense. How does she do that? Through tenuous increments and sway. Each entrance of the word, of language, thus gives us sense. Each absence and each instance rakes sense. The increments flutter until the pace and language of the book set them more firmly into tone, into yes and no. Why even pretend there is anything whole, that there is anything exempt from a yeah or no? Here every addition, every word and every page, can become a call for another deletion, as in this stunning paragraph from the poem “BOOK I WILL NOT WRITE OF MEMORY AND DEATH:”

  I want a thought to rally us, to think it. Think how everyone too is doing something at once, really really good, that begins to be an understanding for a lot of others. You are reading this if you don’t understand. It is almost, urn, as though I never was.

  That many of the non-profices poems are called “BOOK I WILL NOT WRITE …” is also a way for Gregory to say, “how have I not—how am I not—writing this book just in being about its thinking?” To not do something is to do the not-doing. Yeah and no still end up being an “is;” and our actions can make understanding for others outside of us. But the space between our actions and another’s understanding? Yeah, no.

  Let us pause for some incredibly pleasing lines in this book. I must quote three before I gurgle my last point:

  1) goes on in deafness as the blaze of the incomplete completes you

  2) when speech only suffers from what happens

  3) are they fear or is it time to hurl beneath / the busking sun an upsplashed real that flares to tell

  These lines operate as reminders that we are in a space of perpetual sense-making. Just as we know that, yeah, something is, or something is as it is because of how others see, say, or believe it, it is just as much no, not that, or not that for me (we). Gone, or perhaps only redeemable if an un- comes along. But this is not to say YEAH NO makes an excuse for its language as anything senseless; more that it grapples tenderly, and at times roughly, with how we handle truth(s).

  Though sense itself / cannot choose but / suffragate to truth [suff’r it, gate, get it]

  (“TO HYPNOTIZE SPACE AND TIME”)

  Gregory repeatedly calls attention to the unbalanced in YEAH NO, and balances us in doing so. But this is also a sign that we cannot be tricked, even when Gregory’s speaker presents to tell us what the book is about. For it is adorned with no’s and nots and uns but we are with it, in our own understanding, regardless of how we’ve been called to claim our understandings. Which leads me to a few lines I can’t stop thinking about from late in the book, from a longer poem called “”NOW THAT I KNOW DEATH BY RESIDUAL TECHNOLOGY.” Lines where Gregory is swift and smart to enlist a speaker who knows not to pretend whole truth, not to pretend to have mended to our otherwise, and thus go out with them, reader, go window:

  To what belong the concepts I stop caring

  because reason’d produced some excesses,

  such as, some sense, so easily (82)

  Tyler Flynn Dorholt is the author of American Flowers (Dock Street Press), and co-editor and publisher of the journal and press, Tammy. He writes, makes art, and lives with his wife and son in Syracuse, NY.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2013/11/my-enemies-by-jane-gregory/
  Word count: 1084

  QUOTED: "Why be intimidated by the feast Gregory’s book represents? Ever want to read a funny parable about how the author of a book was incriminated for physiologically changing people by posing questions to them? Then read the fifth instance of 'Book I Will Not Write.'"
  "Gregory is full steam ahead. She is paradoxes in your pockets. And it all fits together, because it feels like the speaker is overwhelmed by the desire to put everything relevant in one book, and she wants you to realize overwhelmedness with her."

  My Enemies by Jane Gregory

  Reviewed By Kent Shaw

  November 13th, 2013

  What is the continuous that people keep wanting to write about it? Continuously writing. Like an ocean is continuous or the sky is continuous, and certain poets have taken it on themselves to write continuously, though every books ends. It’s the nature of books. It’s the nature of human attention as well. We have a finite attention. And yet the possibility that we could extend how we see what we see continuously with the same uninterrupted attention, our attention spanning the ocean, the uninterruption of sky, the earth as we could see it floating in outer space, where objective reality is continuous, effortlessly continuous, this kind of attention is pleasure. It is the infinite portion of the Entertainment in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

  It is the ambitious infinite that many poets attempt to stylize in their verse. Whether it’s the surging, subtly surprising, infinitely continuing present in Brandon Shimoda’s Portuguese or the paradoxical, infinitely regressing image of a forest in Michelle Taransky’s Sorry Was in the Woods or the continuously qualified, infinitely reconsidered perpetual rhetoric in Paul Killibrew’s Ethical Consciousness. And these are only a small sampling of how our attention, that fine commodity of the Information Age, has been played out in some of the poetry published in 2013.

  Where does Jane Gregory’s My Enemies fit into that? “This is the sound of the sun on a loop” says the first line of her book. Which is a way of imaging the infinite. Meaning, if you were asked to imagine that asymptotic moment that is “approaching infinity yet not quite reaching infinity,” the moment of almost infinite attention, you might use the sun, a looping image of the sun, because the sun is powerful and big. So big, ancient people, when they were trying to comprehend an all-encompassing power, made the sun one of their go-to’s. They used the ocean, too. And the sky. Which should make it no surprise that Gregory describes the sun, and the ocean, and the sky like they were infinite.

  But Gregory’s depiction of the infinite present comes not only in image. It is in formal mechanics found in the poem “Several Mornings at Once / Give the Lie to the Notion Beyond It,” where pieces of a poem are arranged vertically or horizontally or in 8-point font. The present isn’t uniform! Don’t tie it down! It is in the intention of writing anything at all, like having multiple instances of a poem titled “Book I Will Not Write.” Does that sound like a contradiction? A paradox? A maybe-too-much-cutesy-on-the-concept-of-written-language-front? It could be, if you weren’t Jane Gregory. How about this from “Because We Had Spoken of a Garden They Thought We Were in It”:

  remember looking forward to
  correctly write the end of a world is to
  end the world, stop nothing
  starting no settled faith in the rapture
  while settled the raptor down on the lawn
  and did not crush the earthworms

  How many times are there in this quote of the poem? There is the end of the world as a subject, there is the writing of that future end as an act that happens in the present, there is reference to that troublesome continuous present of faith.

  This book review is starting to sound very complicated, isn’t it. Welcome to Jane Gregory, friends. And if you’re still reading at this point, the infinite is only the beginning. Which might be intimidating. But for the poetry readers who love indeterminacy or inscrutability or insolvency in their poems intimidation is more like invitation. Why be intimidated by the feast Gregory’s book represents? Ever want to read a funny parable about how the author of a book was incriminated for physiologically changing people by posing questions to them? Then read the fifth instance of “Book I Will Not Write.” Gregory is full steam ahead. She is paradoxes in your pockets. And it all fits together, because it feels like the speaker is overwhelmed by the desire to put everything relevant in one book, and she wants you to realize overwhelmedness with her.

  And though I feel like I could rest this review as an enthusiastic consideration of Gregory thinking through overwhelmedness, there is something else at play here. There is something interrupting that infinite sentiment. It could be an outside figure (the Officer that comes up in “Nope / Open,” it could be the B.F. in “Advance Praise for the B.F. Poems”). It could be the many references to faith, and the natural inference that faith would be interrupted by doubt. I value this book for the logical framework, I’m just not sure what exactly is being framed. Is it the Derridaean differance moment, where the impulse to speak is inevitably interrupted / unnaturally concluded by the creation of language? Consider Gregory’s use of puns, or the confusion of grammar. Since when is language really the match for intent? But maybe language and Derrida would be too easy a match. Perhaps My Enemies is more about the contradictory nature of faith, i.e. faith can only be substantially real to the faithful when it is likely to fail them. Read poem titles like “Faith in the Never Beyond, in Other Words, Guncotton” or “How We Became Beyond Faith / Inexplanation.” Read all the contradictory titles. Which is as much to say, “Read Jane Gregory’s My Enemies if you’re a proponent of thinking!”

  Kent Shaw's first book Calenture was published in 2008. His work has appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. He begins teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts in Fall 2016. More from this author →

• Poetry Society
  https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new_american_poets/jane_gregory/
  Word count: 1123

  QUOTED: "There is a wolf, some birds, an officer, as well as occasional (and startling) mentions of the internet. It is a world of prized imperatives constructing the natural manner, within a universe consumed by the nature of language."
  "My Enemies slays with its accurate honesty, the kind of honesty that has the foresight and generosity to also include for its readers the ten books that Jane is refusing to write."

  Jane Gregory, selected by Amanda Nadelberg
  Introduction to the work of Jane Gregory

  How "the way your face is a desert I go / to" Jane Gregory's poems are a place I go to. In fact, I've been going there for a long time, and feel when visiting them, now, the presence of memory palaces that function like stirrups for a soul. Can you tell that I mean this in the most miraculous way possible? They are from the desert (if the desert knew how to walk and talk through a city). There is a wolf, some birds, an officer, as well as occasional (and startling) mentions of the internet. It is a world of prized imperatives constructing the natural manner, within a universe consumed by the nature of language.

  It also seems to me like these poems have existed forever, found perhaps by an archeologist digging in the hot sun (but let us grace him with a chance tree for shade—the poor archeologist!) who then translated them from cuneiform and sent them to The Song Cave. But I've felt that way ever since I first read Jane's poems, five years ago, surprised that there was this ringing person who had written them, sitting at a table, next to me.

  In this book she has written, there is the grave perspective of a voice who knows "some really real shit" and is able to admit that "This book tells the story of how things are getting worse at the parties. You see that things are getting worse at the parties where I am welcome. I am getting worse at my friends although I love them more than when I was better at them." My Enemies slays with its accurate honesty, the kind of honesty that has the foresight and generosity to also include for its readers the ten books that Jane is refusing to write.

  Existing in imperatives—"Say stricken," "now spare it," "Imagine a fire now," "take this humming almost instead" "Be away but first be a desert"—this book is imbued with advice and familiarity, sometimes a bossiness, sometimes necessary haste. And what is an imperative but a trusting relationship between a You and an I? What better way is there to think of those two but as I think Jane does: often interchangeably, the generosity of a self, one able to slip onto another? A writer is a reader after all, and in no other book have I felt that consciousness made so clear, the singing of knowing, speaking as extension of listening. The movement is kaleidoscopic, historical, and also reminds me of this without absurdity but plainly, and with thorough cooperation as the poems of this brilliant book speak to each other.

  In its spirited way My Enemies effortlessly instructs you to do many things, and in this way you are implicated, you have become a part of this book in a place you may or may not have known you needed to get to, and for this we thank the archaeologist. And Jane Gregory has written, "Go // into the arms of the wolf // imagining what the hunter thinks / the animal would be saying, could he speak // contained in the arms of the hunter." Please, go into the arms of this book that Jane Gregory has written. Wonder at "the maximum number of / things" and stunning versions it contains completely, all at once, of you.

  —Amanda Nadelberg
  Statement
  Jane Gregory

  Recently and belatedly, I was taught that if you want to insure contact will be made when you go to give and receive a high-five, you must look at the other person's elbow. I cannot write a statement that discloses my elbow, nor do I want to turn Celan's handshake ("I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem") into the very different and vertical gesture that is the high-five. A statement is accusatory, and as such is in competition with the poems themselves as the things that work to accuse— to accuse meaning to give things the substance of a charge, wanting maybe to mean to give things the charge of a substance. Duncan: "For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions nor an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics." In My Enemies poems are provisional, are provided by an attending—at its root there is to stretch, strain, aim, hear—that betrays itself and is experienced as a diffuse intentionlessness near oblivion or some other lure. In an interview Agnes Martin described the difficult process of giving up on ideas and theories, of not having any herself and not believing anybody else's. Thinking and believing are relinquished simultaneously, so that, she says, "I have an empty mind, so when something comes into it you can see it," and then she says "that must be enough," and means that last statement to end the interview, for the disclosure of the nothing she thinks of to be sufficient, and it is; the interview ends there. There is a thing called the zero conditional and this isn't it: "If nothing happens it is possible / To make things happen." Neither is that, this: "when this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides to destroy it, to convert it into something." Neither is agitation incompatible with the taste of or for nothing. Nor is any of that all of what we're after—follow or seek—, tradecraft, all our problems turning off, palm to palm, a statement or book between them.

  * * *

  Citations: Paul Celan, "[Letter to Hans Bender]," trans. Rosmarie Waldrop; Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book; Agnes Martin, http://bit.ly/15vwf0i; Jack Spicer, Admonitions; Laura (Riding) Jackson, Anarchism Is Not Enough; Baudelaire, "Le Goût du néant"

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