Cover of my first book of poetry, Final Notes, forthcoming from Naked Mannekin Press, $10.00 through PayPal (includes postage). All preorder inquiries: FinalNotes16@gmail.com. http://www.nakedmannekin.blogspot.com/2012/01/final-notes-by-jp-reese.html
Poet Sam Pereira says of Final Notes: Too many times, the idea of a “chapbook” substantiates the claim that poetry has little, if anything, left to say. In JP Reese’s Final Notes, nothing could be farther from the truth. We get snuck up on with lines like “Danger rests in believing the honest blue of the sky.” Remarkably understated, it becomes a sort of poetic fortune cookie, not to be tossed aside, but held on to as our journeys progress.
Another example is the stunning poem “Evanescence,” where we come away feeling the addictive nature of commingling in darkness. There is joy in this knowledge that warmth, however it is made aware to us, is momentary in its dynamic, but worth taking. The poem “2008, What I Wanted” offers wisdom beyond anything that might be stated here about it. This is a manifesto to the world on how not to treat those left breathing.
JP Reese has the skill of an artist and the soul of a survivor. The proof is compiled in a perfectly lean volume that needs to be read with admiration for years to come. Those looking to find that most rarified of beings, a genuine poet, need look no further.
© 2012 by Sam Pereira
Poet Shara McCallum says: These poems are resoundingly of our time. JP Reese’s collection, Final Notes, offers personal lyric-narratives about various subjects: love and desire, a marriage strained by alcohol abuse, a mother’s love for her child, a daughter’s devotion to her aging and declining father. They also speak to public narratives that inscribe our contemporary American lives: 9-11, the war in Iraq, the collapse of the economy and Wall Street’s complicity and corruption. Often, as in “2008, What I Wanted,” the personal and public intersects, naturally and to moving effect. Whatever this poet addresses, her poems reveal the poet-speaker’s desire to speak with complexity and honesty to the totality of what it is to be human. They succeed in doing this largely through the persona she constructs (one that the striking poem addressing Sexton and Plath suggests is the inheritance of Confessionalism). The poems also move us through the sheer force of their images; and Reese’s deft capturing of an unexpected detail frequently reveals the underbelly of what, at first glance, seems ordinary. The title of one of her poems, “It is What It is,” is a catch-phrase in American idiom that highlights one of the primary tensions in this collection. Like that phrase, Final Notes is resigned to looking at ‘what is’—though not to embrace a cynical view of the world but, rather, to find a balance between denial and hopelessness. The “bright razors” with which Reese speaks, then, dissect difficult experience but, also, become a healing.
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