by HALEY JENKINS (2024 Chapbook Contest Winner)
Haley Jenkins’ NATURE EXISTS LAUGHING is full of startling invention and playfulness. Jenkins deftly weaves themes of reclamation, retelling & reinvention to paint a broader landscape and ask personal/ intimate questions of selfhood, of self-place within the system(s) of cycles, boundary of planet & home. It is exactly within the boundary (of book, of theme) that we find an ever-expanding imagination, limitless, it seems, as concepts and correlations come to the forefront of experience. In her own words Haley says,
“I wanted a retelling of time and to encapsulate the change I had experienced over the decades of my life: climate change, environmental disasters, humans damaging what should be sacred, humans destroying each other, the shadow of history whispering promises of repeat. I am a witness in a crowd of witnesses for sure.”
Jenkins deftly wields the powers of implication and transgressive well throughout the entire book. What stuns is the visual elements of each piece, what rings out is the music within.
From sandstone
“singing lines into cliffs is mother-work we’re talking glacier persuasion with the promise of erosion the sound of one thing leaving another”
NATURE EXISTS LAUGHING feels like a speculative love story tracing the past but told in the language of the future, soundbites perhaps, of how things might have happened. Using concrete poems to explore abstract narratives, like that of a tektite, a terrestrial piece of debris ejected from meteorite impact. Or the lightbulb of his sarsen stands as a megalith of its own, constructing a temple of awe and wonder. You cannot help but become immersed in the world of this book. Threaded from the micro to the macro is a journey of reclamation woven from the existence that shapes us all into the unique figures that we are. There are no answers here, only explorations and more questions and that’s in part what makes Haley’s work so special.
Take the trip for yourself, purchase a copy of NATURE EXISTS LAUGHING today!
Stone Corpse Press 