Peony Vertigo by Jan Conn

Poems emerging from deep memory and shifting landscapes to joyously engage flora, fauna, and self.

In her latest collection,Peony Vertigo, Jan Conn's poetic sensibility disperses and gathers, careens and slides, in and out of relation with the endangered world. Through poems ranging from global to microscopic scales, Conn's beholden, fluid sense of self dissolves into fog and river, and reconstitutes as bright orange newt, prehistoric horse, painter, and mourning daughter. Her voice is vulnerable, ecstatic, and elliptical, a tender exploration of liminal consciousness and the urge to identify with environments in crisis. (From Brick Books)

Jan Conn is a Quebec-born poet, professor and research scientist for the New York State Department of Health. She has written ten poetry collections including Botero's Beautiful Horses and What Dante Did With Loss. She won the Malahat Review PK Page Founders' Award Poetry Prize in 2006 for her poem Golden. She currently lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.