Beauties on Mad River

Jan Conn

"Conn's poetry tends to take a hard objective viewpoint... Her scholarship... is remarkable and gives a richness to her work that makes her poetry map ‘not so much the world as the soul' as George Elliot Clarke has said." -Joanna M. Weston, The Danforth Review

"Quite a meaty collection...Jan Conn has always been one of my favorite Vehicule published poets, for the use of more narrative forms in unnarrative, thoughtful and emotional ways, and in the strength of her clarity...clear in what is hidden." -rob mclennan, The Danforth Review

"These smart and thoughtful poems (over half of them new) drift like swamp fog between love and death, and reveal the sad folly of investing fully in eros or thanatos. Conn's lyric and peripatetic poems are restless; this poetry no longer believes in the geographical cure. The lush botanical imagery glosses over disappointment, and suggests that admiration of vibrant beauty always leads back to personal unease, an inability to stave off anxiety or chronic insomnia." -Tanis MacDonald, Monday Magazine