Snakes and Babies: Poems - Paperback

by Jules Gibbs (Author)

The one-word titles of Jules Gibbs's Snakes and Babies are potentialities of immense expansion. These poems are incapable of being singular, inert, quiet. They are manifold, animated, agitated by energies of politics, dreams, and desires--systems of menace and pleasure. She obeys Celan's advice to "speak, but keep yes and no unsplit," but in all other ways is disobedient to "love's old patterns." The weather is rain. The ecology is woman. The time is violence. The angels are emus, flightless, and endangered. The voice talks back to our alienation and annihilation. In Gibbs's hands, poems are a "voodoo that eats through paper," an alternate history that wounds as it cures.

Author Biography

Jules Gibbs is the author of the book of poems, Bliss Crisis, published by The Sheep Meadow Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence Program. She has taught literature and creative writing at Hamilton College, and currently teaches at Syracuse University. Gibbs is the poetry editor for The Progressive Magazine, and she is a long-time board member of Punto de Contacto Gallery, where she curates the Cruel April reading series. She currently serves as vice president for the Adjuncts United teachers' union, representing part-time faculty.