Daybreak and Deep

by Jessica D. Thompson

Daybreak and Deep is a rich and graceful assembly of requiems, for family and home places, for a spouse. Jessica D. Thompson honors, then abandons the innocence of childhood and the prescribed gender roles imbued with religion and tradition - We wore the white of the sacrificed / tied the knot. Instead, Thompson travels the sharp-edged road of grief while wildly embracing hurt and loss: I want / to run outside, gather firewood, chop / off my hair, stain my face with the husks / of walnuts, leave my handprint on the / wall of a cave. In praise of loves lost, of crows and cowslip, of making art amid great sorrow, this poet's voice is a glowing testament to this earthbound life / in a season of frost.

-Marianne Worthington, Author of The Girl Singer


Jessica D. Thompson's extraordinary collection twirls and spins - a poetic sema, a deep listening - each poem a dervish, one hand receiving the blessings of attention - rose petals floating in a rain barrel; candlelight [warming] butter-crème walls, one hand bestowing the bittersweet gifts of remembrance - the symmetry of married sleep; the small hole in the front pocket of [a] late husband's 505 Levi's.

... beneath / the Big Dipper, I twirled / in long night gowns - / spinning round and round /
until I ran out of breath, / until the earth caught fire / beneath my bare feet.

We return from this modern-day heroine's journey, rejoicing in the blue light of May. I know I will return to this book again and again, for the pleasure of its linguistic grace and to listen to the sound of leaves / trembling - / like tambourines in trees.

-Kim Noriega, Author of Name Me


In Daybreak and Deep, Thompson gives us a collection of poems so delicately tuned to the ecology of love and loss that the book itself is a house of prayer for all people, for all creatures, for every leaf and bloom and weed, for this heartbreak, heaven of a life.

-Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse and Poetry Editor, Oxford American