Book:
Deadly Birds of the Soul
Dense with lyric beauty, complex in their formal and imagistic architecture, the poems of DeAnn Jordan’s, Deadly Birds of the Soul, soar above the mundane, swoop into matters of the spirit and then dive into the depths of lived experience. These poems engage the real world through heightened observations and explore the depths of those otherworlds that exist at the edges of perception (or the wings of a bird), linking both to a personal mythology that is fascinating. Jordan’s complex and stunning use of both the music of words and the silences between them is a revelation.
“DeAnn Jordan’s bold first book sings the body awake with its gothic glamour, its unapologetic angers and lush lyricism. Although these poems are haunted by body betrayals — childhood abuse, the death of a parent, the thwarted desire to give birth — such losses are answered with a daring female spirituality that is nothing short of triumphant. These are provocative poems, glittering, dark, dangerous and beautiful.”
~ Dorothy Barresi, Rouge Pulp and The Post-Rapture Diner
“‘Deadly Birds of the Soul'” is a powerful, complex, most beautiful and painful, exhilarating and shattering series of poems. Each in its own way takes off — both in shape, in sense, in music, in feeling — like a bird.”
~ Dorothy G. Clark, PhD
Cherry Grove Collections: For more information about my publisher, how to order copies in bulk and for sample poems, click here.
Click here to purchase Deadly Birds of the Soul on Amazon.
Various poems and short stories have also appeared in the following:
Whispers From the Seaweed, Poems (Chapbook, 1997)
The California Quarterly, Volume 33, No. 3, California State Poetry Society
Roar: Women’s Studies Journal
The Northridge Review
Barbaric Yawp
Firstdraft
Obra: A Student Journal of Art and Literature (Also Editor-in-Chief)
Awards
California Young Playwrights Project (Finalist)
Benjamin Saltman Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention)
Poetics
In my poetry I explore various aspects of the human psyche. I explore this and that otherworld, using a mythic base of symbol and archetype through the organic stuff of my experience as a human being which at least addresses, if not answers, the desire to create meaning from the seeming chaos of that experience. The interconnectedness of themes in my poems — the feminine, personal mythology, the dissociation of the psyche, loss, the war between creation and destruction, the ultimate reality of death — all emerge from the landscape of the body, of emotion, of spirit rendered in fragments. It is this fragmentation that I strive to enact in the formal structures of my poems, which helps to visually imply the sense of brokenness made explicit by their content. It is a reflection of identity formation which never happens in a straight line, but is a process of the gathering up of fragments of experiences and perceptions which we collectively call the self. It has been my goal to map the various landscapes of many possible selves in relation to those wider worlds.
My book, Deadly Birds of the Soul, in Barnes & Noble 2007