Interested in thresholds—the sky-smear between night and day, the rift between the speaker’s mind and the outward world—the poems follow nighttime observations and experiences, navigating two parallel desires: to be seen, but also to see more clearly. Through assemblage and scrutiny, Eveningful shows how a self can construct strength and how that strength can bridge thresholds as we work to know and be known.
Eveningful is the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, chosen by Rick Barot.
Prasie for Eveningful:
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"In Eveningful, disclosures are made the way you would tell a closely held story about yourself to a stranger at a party. The disclosures are like charms, part of the bright, brief scene . . . Whalen's poems have an aching passion . . . they keep dazzling me back into an alertness towards my own intimate life.”
Rick Barot
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"Reading these poems feels a bit like falling in love . . . as if the ground has given way and yet everything it had supported still hovers in place, glimmering with strange particulars that permit us—at last!—to perceive them for the first time."
Heather Christle
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"Eveningful is lush with earfuls and eyefuls, with arrangements of bodies social and intimate in a world Jennifer Whalen navigates with her understanding that attention is most interesting when one's body is not easily defined . . . These poems are wonderfully bright, serious, and sexy like nobody else's."
Kathleen Peirce