From everyday scenes that clothe a cast of characters in weather, tears, and prayer, to the “animal between,” where the narrator conjures her desires into the courage to explore her sexuality, from the ontological vignettes of a woman living in Northern Japan under the constant presence of fog, to the etymological, political eruptions that reside in language, The Hominine Egg suggests that vigilance is a spiritual practice, out of which one must hatch, again and again.
Praise for The Hominine Egg
Jenny Gropp’s poems are alive. In them thought wrestles and dances through the circuits of syntax, pressing words into lines twisted and surprising and true to the intricacy of emotional life. Just when you think one of her lines might calm and settle, the torque of Gropp’s mind spins it open. The words split and take us through a world, a thought unexpected. -Magdelena Zurawski
“So this is how people / play before waking, / before behind the glass / becomes the bottom of the pan.” The poems in The Hominine Egg, in a dream logic, in an open study of the world’s properties and our language for them, close at hand and lost in fog, present their findings as acts of recovery. Deriving is a means of revelation. I feel, reading this extraordinary book, like one of its novitiates, chasing down fugitive understanding of what more we know there is to know, miraculously falling “like salt on a space / and circumstance appears.” -Brian Blanchfield
In The Hominine Egg, vast thickets of vision bolt breakneck through the reader, images alive and intact, encased in movement. Somehow Jenny Gropp has managed to make parsable the external world while capturing the tiniest electrons of inner experience; her poetry’s “speed is the outside of things / becoming everything.” -Laura Solomon
“The earth shakes its feast,” writes the poet at the 11th hour of this exquisite first collection. Well, collection rides wide of the mark: perhaps interfusion hints truer. Try one seismic alloy of all: her corporeal frame imbibing the texture, the architecture, the weather, the word whose spleen is mercury, the liquor, the landscape, the eros, the thanatos, the jabs of prismlike lyric, and this silence settling between each luminous word like a confetti of fish scales falling through a bird. It’s a broken world book to get your hands dirty with; it’s an aesthetician’s dream; it’s seambursted with clarion wisdoms; it’s a feast. In fact, if I had four syllables to b(l)urble it, I’d chirp: gustatory. Jenny Gropp is a major new force in American poetry: unhollow yourself via her sumptuous wordway. -Abraham Smith
Excerpt from The Hominine Egg
animal between
The bird that grew up in my body is a long-legged wader
and it hides in the public bathroom when the storm hits,
heavier torso pushed up against the row
of sinks that, no matter how clean, always feels dirty;
this bird has shoulders, hunched wet and rising,
devotion to form that’s lung pink and black, compulsion
and passion leaving me humiliated in the reality of never
hatching because I’ve always already hatched.
I didn’t say birds. It was more like there was
a loud bang and an animal inside me moved.
The ways I would like to say your name
if I was allowed to kiss you. If what would allow
me. If stone could boil up and out and apart
like water, raise the lid. The stone in all
this water. Always some malignance
in desire. Desire that pushes itself
to physical form. I can ask my telephone
what airplanes are above me now
and I can see the actual patterns in the sky
on the screen, the range of ages and cargos moving
at five hundred miles an hour, at altitude.
Breathe. Birds and the sky fills. The weather
just came and came for me until I realized
we live in a blue house and I’m a wasp
sheltered inside of paper I spit up, waiting
for a hand to pick up the nest and turn
it over. Waiting to see a giant eye taking
in my whole body at once. This is mostly the job
of weather, I realized when I learned to fear it, until
I learned how like the weather I am, which lasts
until you’re gone and the fear becomes regular,
like how the riverbed is responsible
for the river. I have kissed you so many times
and you don’t even know it. One can really live
in the mind. Never mind if she’s quiet. Birds,
and she’s gone, but not really. That bird whose call
from the porch railing just outside sounds like a woman
screaming from far away. I’ve gotten to know that bird
but when my friend visited she rose, alarmed. I might find a way
through fear so that even if I’m still in it, I could say, I’ve never heard that
sound come out of me before, maple animal rising
out of a red fan of trees, hip and jaw.
