Work samples
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Coupling.pdf"Coupling," which appears in my book Missing Persons, was first published in 32 Poems. Of it, Sarah Blake wrote: "I love poems that play with a reader’s expectations. I’m reminded of Donald Barthelme’s 'The School' when I read Hilary S. Jacqmin’s 'Coupling.' In what might be the sweet, innocent setting of two people who have just moved in together, there is a butcher block 'spiked…with knives' and a hyacinth the color of a bruise that 'die[s] within a week.' There are fights and Jewish law is broken. Where will this go? Will it end with sex like 'The School' almost does? Is a gerbil about to enter? Or were those details foreshadowing a death, a murder? Are we coming to a moment that’s sacrosanct or sacrilegious? The quiet build, the laying out of specifics, allows for almost anything. What will the poet do when the poet can do anything? This is how the reader comes to the last stanza. The first line has 'hands pal[ing] with salt,' how hands might pale in death.
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Day of the Dead by Hilary S. Jacqmin - passagesnorth.pdf"Day of the Dead," which is included in my book Missing Persons, appeared in both Passages North (an American magazine) and Oxford Poetry (an English magazine). For several years, I worked at Harvard Divinity School, which was located just across the street from Harvard's Peabody Museum.
About Hilary
Book: Missing Persons
For more information, or to read additional excerpts, go to https://waywiser-press.com/product/missing-persons/#excerpts.
Praise for Missing Persons
- “Missing Persons is one of the best debut poetry collections that I’ve read in years. Jacqmin’s poems are richly varied in syntax, diction, and form. They’re also funny, and at times surprisingly hard-edged—but whether Jacqmin is writing about dry drunks, a fastidious Latin teacher, or a grown-up Jughead adrift in Tokyo, she never allows herself to affect an attitude of being superior to her subject matter. Instead, she patiently, faithfully seeks out real mysteries and works to articulate them in all their strangeness.” – James Arthur
- “I admire the intelligent ultra talk of Hilary Jacqmin’s virtuosic and revealing poems. A full life is lived on these pages, and it flickers with light and dark.” – Henri Cole
- “In Missing Persons, memory is a cabinet of curiosities filled with tiny figures carved from bone, scimitars, ticking oven timers, sugar skulls. These are poems that teach us how the ordinary may be transformed; a nightgown stained with rabbit urine becomes ‘yellow shantung,’ a beer gut ‘softly beautiful,’ women’s bodies ‘curved like wine bottles.’ Jacqmin has a particular gift for portraits in miniature. Young loves, Girl Scouts, sex ed teachers, a father, a mother—all are rendered lovely and interesting through the delicate treatment of the imagination. And, as with any wunderkammer, we want to return to the glimmering rooms of these poems again and again, discovering each time we visit something new to hold and behold.” – Jehanne Dubrow
- “Jacqmin’s poetry displays a wonderfully rich diction that conveys her keen eye for defining detail. Always in the mix there is her agile wit, typically gentle but mischievous too. Sometimes things are darker, but then compassionate too. Jacqmin’s world ranges from a mostly predictable upper Midwest, to arresting scenes in art and literature, to the Russia of Chernobyl, to the seaport dives of downtown Baltimore. In all of these settings there are characters who choose their paths by accident or misconception, bumping their ways along as we do and continuing in ways we admire. There is a wised-up kindness and exuberance to this work that makes Jacqmin’s poems the best of company, well-spoken guests always invited back.” – Wyatt Prunty
Minerva Platform Poetry Project
Hilary, on houses & gardens
I have been drawn to the topic of country houses and gardens for a long time, initially because of their visual splendour. Growing up, I made frequent visits to Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, Ohio, a Tudor Revival mansion built between 1912 and 1915 for the founder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. I loved Stan Hywet’s ornate architecture and landscaped grounds, which include a walled English garden complete with reflecting pool. The life of the estate seemed present, distilled somehow into the rust-stippled screen door at the back of the Great Hall or the rustling birch tree allée. Still, I would imagine how magnificent the house must have been when it was full of people.
As an undergraduate English major at Wesleyan University, inspired by classes on Gothic and Victorian literature, I became fascinated by garden history and the complex way that houses and gardens have been used as sites of meaning and control. As an MA student in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA student in poetry at the University of Florida, I wrote numerous poems, many of them set in England, about houses and gardens. These poems were based on extensive research, some of which I conducted on-site. I found that visits to historic houses and gardens invariably inspired me to write when I had exhausted other subjects.
I hope that these four pieces succeed as poems of both critique and longing.