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WORK TITLE: Marvels of the Invisible
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jennymolberg.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.ucmo.edu/englphil/facstaff/molberg.cfm * https://www.pw.org/content/jenny_molberg * http://www.institutofranklin.net/en/academics/teach-learn/master-in-teaching/academic-information/faculty/jenny-molberg/ * http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Poetry-by-Dean-Rader-Elizabeth-Powell-Jenny-10970203.php
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Houston, TX.
EDUCATION:American University, M.F.A.; University of North Texas, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. University of Central Missouri, assistant professor.
AWARDS:Third Coast Poetry Prize, 2013; Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2014, for Marvels of the Invisible.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Rattling Wall, Missouri Review, Adroit Journal, North American Review, Mississippi Review, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, New Guard, and Poetry International. Pleiades, poetry coeditor.
SIDELIGHTS
Prior to launching her writing career, Jenny Molberg attended the American University and the University of North Texas, where she earned her master’s and postdoctoral degrees, respectively. She is affiliated with Pleiades, where she serves as an editor of poetry, as well as the University of Central Missouri, where she leads English courses. She has also contributed her own writing to several periodicals, such as Mississippi Review and Ploughshares. Her work has garnered several accolades, including two Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Third Coast award in the year 2013.
Marvels of the Invisible is her first published collection of poetry. The book’s main themes focus on life, death, the emotions intertwined with both of these concepts, and various, unexplained natural phenomena. A few of the poems featured in the book are inspired by real life occurrences, some of which relate to Molberg’s personal life while others do not. “Marvels of the Invisible,” the poem the book is titled after, addresses her father’s childhood decision to start a project which, ultimately, spiralled into something much more. “Storm Coming,” one of the last poems featured, centers on generational admiration; Molberg examines the relationship between her father and her grandfather, as well as between her father and herself. “Echolocation” is one of the first poems to be featured in the work, its speaker being a mother who has lost her child and uses oceanic imagery to describe her feelings about that loss. “Matryoshka” again centers on Molberg’s family dynamics, particularly in terms of how she views herself and, in turn, relates to her family. By illustrating these relationships through matryoshka dolls, Molberg depicts how closely intertwined her family is with her overall identity. Another poem, “Superficial Heart,” tells the tale of an infant girl who was born under unusual circumstances. Her heart is completely separated from her body. Despite her mother’s desire to keep her safe and healthy, the girl dies, leaving her mother to lament her lost future. Other poems deal with illness and related afflictions, as well as how they affect the family of the sufferer. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “Molberg takes the unlikely, unseeable, and impossible and gives them narratives of their own in this lyrically imaginative debut.” SF Gate contributor Diana Whitney commented: “‘Marvels of the Invisible‘ is a shrine to our fragility, a strange hymn praising all we cannot see.” On the Los Angeles Review website, Tyler Robert Sheldon stated: “Marvels of the Invisible creates a vivid world worthy of love, in all its transient brilliance.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 16, 2017, review of Marvels of the Invisible, p. 40.
ONLINE
Jenny Molberg Website, https://www.jennymolberg.com (October 17, 2017), author profile.
Los Angeles Review, http://losangelesreview.org/ (October 1, 2017), review of Marvels of the Invisible.
Poets & Writers, https://www.pw.org/ (October 17, 2017), author profile.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com (March 1, 2017), review of Marvels of the Invisible.
University of Central Missouri, https://www.ucmo.edu/ (October 17, 2017), author profile.
Jenny Molberg
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Department of English and Philosophy
University of Central Missouri
Warrensburg, MO 64093
Phone:
2148082666
E-mail:
geauxmolberg@gmail.com
Website:
www.jennymolberg.com
AUTHOR'S BIO
Jenny Molberg's debut collection, Marvels of the Invisible, won the 2014 Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2016. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, North American Review, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review, The Adroit Journal, Rattling Wall, and other journals. She is the recipient of the 2013 Third Coast poetry prize, and was featured in Best New Poets 2014. Molberg holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from American University. Currently, she is assistant professor of English at the University of Central Missouri and poetry editor for Pleiades. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
PUBLICATIONS AND PRIZES
Books:
Marvels of the Invisible (Tupelo Press, 2014)
Prizes Won:
Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2014 Third Coast Poetry Prize, 2013
REVIEWS, RECORDINGS, AND INTERVIEWS
Echolocation (The Adroit Journal)
Three Poems (The Boiler Journal)
Four Poems (Mudlark)
Narrative (Verse Daily)
What the Light Gives Back: An Interview with B.H. Fairchild (American Literary Review)
MORE INFORMATION
Listed as:
Poet
Gives readings:
Yes
Travels for readings:
Yes
Identifies as:
Caucasian
Prefers to work with:
Any
Fluent in:
English
Born in:
Houston
Raised in:
Dallas, TX
English & Philosophy
About
For Students
Current Students
Future Students
Scholarships
Clubs & Organizations
People
English and Philosophy Degrees
English and Philosophy Minors
Pleiades
Visiting Writers Series
Jenny Molberg
Assistant Professor of English
Education
Ph.D. University of North Texas
M.F.A. American University
B.A. Louisiana State University
Areas of Interest
Poetry, Creative Writing, Modern and Contemporary American Literature, Co-editor of Pleiades
Office Hours-Fall 2017:
Tuesday/Thursday
11:00-12:30 & 3:15-4:15
(Or by appointment)
Department of English and Philosophy
Office: Martin Bldg., 336N
Phone: 660-543-8106
Email: molberg@ucmo.edu
JENNY MOLBERG
Jenny Molberg won the 2014 Berkshire Prize for her debut collection, Marvels of the Invisible (Tupelo Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry International, North American Review, Copper Nickel, The New Guard, The Adroit Journal, Mississippi Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of the 2013 Third Coast poetry prize, was featured in Best New Poets 2014, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Molberg holds an MFA from American University and a PhD from the University of North Texas. She currently teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is Co-editor of Pleiades.
Marvels of the Invisible
Publishers Weekly. 264.3 (Jan. 16, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Marvels of the Invisible
Jenny Molberg. Tupelo, $16.95 trade paper (76p) ISBN 978-1-936797-92-9
Molberg takes the unlikely, unseeable, and impossible and gives them narratives of their own in this lyrically imaginative debut. The world of the book is hopeful even when it is precarious; in "Superficial Heart," Molberg ponders the life of a child born with a heart outside of her body, had she survived. Even in the book's moments of grief, Molberg always offers renewal: "when a whale dies, it lives a second time./ It must drop to great depths, then an ecosystem/ is born of its body." Water, ever-malleable, is a driving metaphor, and the metamorphosis of a liquefying caterpillar that "builds a shell around itself/ dissolves, becomes another thing" operates as an act of faith and trust. The title poem is named for the instruction manual of a microscope that the narrator's father received as a child, and which in turn fueled a life's work. Molberg engages in ekphrastic dialogue with works of art and science, but her strongest poems address intimacies. A matryoshka doll becomes a metaphor for small personal secrets, while an oyster occasions a meditation on grief: "If you look closely,/ there is a ring, mother-of-pearl, around the hole./ It's the place closest to pain that shines." Molberg explores absence to conceive of new possibilities. (Feb.)
Poetry by Dean Rader, Elizabeth Powell, Jenny Molberg
By Diana Whitney Updated 5:43 pm, Wednesday, March 1, 2017
[...]
In her prize-winning debut, Marvels of the Invisible (Tupelo Press; $16.95), Jenny Molberg examines mysteries of the natural world and the human heart. With curiosity and precision, she takes a scalpel to a chrysalis to see what’s inside “the hot, cocooned/ unfolding of metamorphosis.” She unpacks the secrets of a Russian nesting doll, a wooden mother containing a wooden daughter. And in a wondrous opening elegy, “Echolocation,” Molberg travels deep beneath the sea seeking language for a lost pregnancy, grieving a child at home in whale song: “unfathomable, plosive, drummed, the loudest blues/ on earth.”
Molberg’s startling collection mixes memory with biology while citing the Torah, the Brothers Grimm and archival letters from 18th century scientists. She likes to get right up close to the body, delve into its interior for meaning. In her lucid, clear-voiced poems, acts of seeing become acts of self-definition. Dreaming of her doctor father as a boy, she sees him viewing an ant under his toy microscope, the insect “almost sickening in its translucence.” The body laid bare is intimate and excruciating, like her mother’s cancer decades later.
Molberg’s speakers continually expose their loneliness and barrenness even as they marvel at beauty. They see pain shining in a splintered oyster shell, hear muffled voices inside a pomegranate where “the seeds swell in their white caves.” Invoking her childhood in West Texas, Molberg melds anatomy with the landscape, transforming the Vena Cava into the Rio Grande. “The human body in grief is a shrine,” she writes, and “Marvels of the Invisible” is a shrine to our fragility, a strange hymn praising all we cannot see.
BOOK REVIEW: MARVELS OF THE INVISIBLE BY JENNY MOLBERG
Reviewed by Tyler Robert Sheldon
Marvels of the Invisible
Poems by Jenny Molberg
Tupelo Press, February 2017
$16.95; 78 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1936797929
Jenny Molberg’s debut poetry collection Marvels of the Invisible grapples with generational hardships, medical afflictions, faith, and relationships to others. Winner of Tupelo Press’s well-regarded Berkshire Prize, this collection explores the speaker’s relationship to a daughter and her parents. Marvels of the Invisible is a hard-eyed look at what ails these other characters, and how the world around them is affected.
The opening poem, “Echolocation,” establishes the ocean as metaphor for that stilted world: “I think of you, my lost girl, when the wing / of a tailfin rises beside the boat, dripping / in salted robes.” The speaker knows that her child recognizes her true place, perhaps more so than the mother: “A child / hears her home in clefs of water, in whale song: / . . . the loudest blues / on earth.” These descriptions turn dark later in the poem, becoming literal. The narrator’s fear is palpable in Molberg’s efficient language: “Nothing on the sonogram for weeks. / The nurse’s dull hand like a river stone / on my belly.” Biblical allusions turn that fear to anger, and still later the narrator is “prey in the hot slick belly of the sea,” helpless in the face of unalterable circumstances. This relationship, and the lens of the whale and the sea, inform large portions of the collection.
The speaker also works through afflictions visited upon her mother, whose double mastectomy is likened to her father’s childhood examination of ants. In the collection’s title poem, “My father is six years old. The light / spills in as he bends over the microscope / and folds a single ant onto a plastic slide.” Later these examinations come full-circle, and it is the speaker who marvels: “[My father] shows me the room full of microscopes. / I imagine his eye, how it descends / like a dark blue planet.” As he stands sentinel over the speaker’s mother, he “matches his breath with hers, / as they do each night / in the slow river of a breathing house / and beneath her skin, her blood blossoms.”
The speaker’s relationships become complicated in “Necrosis,” where ailments seem to seek out the family. Doctors see mainly bad news through their microscope lenses, and Molberg writes, “You, microscope, are a hungry priest. / . . . Only God’s fingers could become so small.” The narrator continues: “I could see Him in a young girl’s / bone marrow. / Her cells swelled, / vacuolized: ribosomes, cytoplasm, leaking / like spilled jelly.” To the speaker, the child’s medical afflictions are so ruthlessly efficient that they seem intelligent.
When more of the daughter’s circumstances are revealed in “Superficial Heart,” the narrator’s difficulties are compounded: coping with more than most will ever know, she witnesses a crucial anomaly. “It’s monstrous already, the human heart,” she confides, “so think / of the child born with her heart outside her body.” The mother knows it must be protected: “with two pillows, she dams / the heart . . . a tremor / of water, impossible to hold or protect.” When the child passes away, the speaker thinks on what might have been: “If only she’d lived. / . . . her mother / would wade with her into the pond, or let her / whisk the eggs for breakfast.” Knowing and grieving, this mother’s imagination blooms with daily reminders of an empty place.
The speaker finds mirrors throughout this collection, perhaps most notably in “Her Hand, The Compass,” where a friend shares her ever-knowing grief. She explains, “My neighbor walks with wide steps around the yellow crocuses, / moves her hand over the life that kicks in her. // She doesn’t know that this child will never be born.” In her garden, this neighbor paints the world for her child, much as the narrator does for her own:
Here, the lights
will only stun you a minute. You will shoot up like thyme
and tangle with the world where everything
wants to be meant for something bigger.
Even for so much absence, the narrator’s family is united through the metaphor of nesting dolls in the poem “Matryoshka.” She empathizes with their struggles, seeing yet another mirror: those qualities her family possesses that she sees also within herself. She notes, “When you take away the children / the mother is empty.” More specifically still, she observes, “If you look closer, a thin line / cuts the rose. This is where / the mother is broken.” Later, when the speaker puts these nesting dolls back together, the connections emerge: “Each mother / becomes my daughter and I become / each mother.” She whispers to the reader,
I have seen how small
I can be. I will put
the wooden child back inside me.
And the woman inside me. And the woman
inside me. And the woman inside me.
These nesting dolls paint a painful, if cathartic portrait for the narrator: she is her family, and her family is her. Their weaknesses, but also their great strengths, bind her life together.
The collection’s final poem, “Storm Coming,” holds true to these cyclical principles. The narrator finds resemblance to her father, who in turn seeks communion with his own father through personal ritual: “I’ve seen the way he is / with his father. He counts down the lightning” as he reaches to the past. “Dad, he’ll say, how about next time // we’ll go and get some of those peaches you like, / out by the highway? He’ll laugh a laugh // that knows its own ending.” The speaker also finds communion with family. As Molberg shows us in bright color, these connections are the world—even if in the end “we don’t have time to love it.” Marvels of the Invisible creates a vivid world worthy of love, in all its transient brilliance.
Tyler Sheldon is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of First Breaths of Arrival (Oil Hill Press, 2016) and Traumas (Yellow Flag Press, 2017). His poems, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Quiddity International Literary Journal, Coal City Review, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, The Dos Passos Review, Entropy Magazine, and other publications. He earned his MA in English at Emporia State University, where he studied with Kansas Poet Laureate Kevin Rabas, and is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University.