Brave Disguises (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

It is very rare that a poet is able to meld the poetry of the body and the poetry of the mind. I believe Jacobik has done so in Brave Disguises, and has done so gracefully. - Marilyn Chin ""At the center of these poems is a writer who is willing to open herself fully to the world's and living's beautiful strangeness and capricious painfulness."" - Robert Cording ""These are poems of arriving and vanishing, mergings of classical concerns with dot-coms, blunt sexuality with wounded prayers. Debris and shabby truths are acknowledged and transformed into the Good. A lucid poetry, expertly crafted, amazing work."" - Dick Allen

A poet with an artist's eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp's ""terribly surreal"" life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover's - or a mother's - secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy. from ""The Power Outage"" Visible from an upstairs window, the cloud-caught glow of an end-of-summer carnival goes suddenly black as all else. Must be children stuck on the Ferris wheel. My palms slide down banisters to the candle drawer. Nothing to do but go to bed. The world is as dark as it ever was. Wind is awash in the music of trees. We rest in one another's arms but there's no spark between us tonight, nothing to kindle, so I voice a memory and you voice another, and we go back and forth like this, surveying in deep enclosing darkness, the turns circumstance and promises have given us.