Jehanne Dubrow

Taste: A Book of Small Bites by Jehanne Dubrow is a pleasant addition to the No Limits series. Interdisciplinary as well as very personal, this is a wonderful adventure through taste and how we perceive it.

Admittedly there will be some frustrated people who grab their thesaurus and attack the creativity here as a cover-up for what they themselves lack. That is okay, it is probably hard being so petty all the time and needing to lash out. Forgive the child. Also ignore the entitled pompous child, they make little to no sense.

Dubrow weaves her look at taste through both personal recollections and various literary commentaries. This works very well for the most part as we go from Proust to beekeeping and on to the science of various tastes. There is also the social and cultural aspects which bring in interesting and sometimes disturbing pieces of history.

The writing is good, fluctuating between poetic and expository depending on the topic at hand. Like so many such books the value is less in whether what is written is "new" or already common knowledge and more about how these things are positioned in relation to each other. If one can't appreciate new perspectives only new information, well, too bad, maybe they will evolve at some point. For the rest of us, we can see our own relationship with taste from different perspectives thanks to this type of work.

Highly recommended for those readers who enjoy looking at common ideas and processes through a lens that is personal at the same time that it looks at the bigger picture. Those who think themselves clever through posturing will likely feel only jealousy and lash out. Again, ignore them, they are far too petty to bother with.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)

The Hardship Post by Jehanne Dubrow, published by Three Candles Press, is about the many posts that we take on in life that are in the midst of the fray — whether that is the overseas diplomat in a war-torn country or the descendent of a Holocaust victim. Dubrow’s verse is infused with its own rhythm and even sometimes an internal rhyme, and this musicality penetrates the mind of the reader, bringing to life not only the harsh, and sometimes distant, memories of pain, but the reverberations of that pain decades into the future.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/04/the-hardship-post-by-jehanne-dubrow.html… (altro)

Red Army Red by Jehanne Dubrow is a collection that is broken down into three, clear sections — Cold War, Velvet Revolution, and Laissez-Faire — with a preface section — Red Army Red — and one poem, “Chernobyl Year.” Dubrow’s narrator recalls the lives of American Diplomats in Communist-controlled Poland during the Cold War and pays homage to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the rebellion of youth before concluding in the commercialized freedom and excess of capitalism. Her poems are all at once playful, somber, and achingly real.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/02/red-army-red-by-jehanne-dubrow.html… (altro)

Before I begin, I should admit to my biases. I like Jehanne Dubrow. She is a kind and intelligent person with a wonderfully irreverent sense of humor (that is very similar to mine) and I consider her a friend. But I am also a poet, and in this capacity, I have been following Jehanne’s work since the release of her first collection, The Hardship Post, in 2009. Each collection of hers is a poetic study, a project. String the poems together and you will see a loose narrative formed there in between.

In Red Army Red, Cold War’s Communism appropriates all shiny things for propaganda the way a teenage girl accessorizes. They are magpies at heart. Dubrow, in turn, collects these glimmering metallic details and nests poems in them. Of course, not all of these details are beautiful but they have a certain shine that draws us in anyway. In “Moscow Nights,” “rose perfume…smells of piss,” and another perfume smells of “pickled beets/ and turpentine.” And as in the mind of a teenage girl, all of these details are sex or innuendo, “the romance of objects.” Things that Communist dictators would hold just out of reach.

The first section of the book, titled “Cold War,” although packed with vivid images is a stark landscape full of old objects. Not just old, but old-world. Something that the speaker has clearly outgrown. Shirts and shoes are two sizes too small and all pleasures are taken in secret.

Section two, “Velvet Revolution,” is a rebellious adolescent testing the limits of her own body’s dictatorship. Although taken from the actual historical context of nearby then-Czechoslovakia, the phrase taken out of time seems tailor-made to capture the melodrama of teenage rebellion, with another nod toward an adolescent’s newfound fashion-consciousness. The poems of this section take the melodrama of an average American teenager and place it within a nation in flux. Let’s just triple the anxiety-level. The poems “Five-Year Plan” and “November 1989” capture this juxtaposition best. In the latter, the speaker has locked herself in the bathroom teaching herself to shave her legs and underarms while “Outside our house: Warsaw, avenues/ named for generals…Everything was falling down.”

In the last section, “Laissez-faire,” our speaker is in the full bloom of her new womanhood. And the world has opened its commercial doors to her (and her parents’ credit cards), with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism in the Eastern Bloc. This section is populated with satirical poems praising the wonder of merchandise and variety and everything that money can buy: “Bag ‘N Save,” “Our Free-Market Romance,” “Warsaw IKEA,” “A History of Shopping,” “As Seen on TV.” Little Red is all grown up now and flung from starkness into a post-Communist rumspringa. It is overwhelming and disorienting, but there is still the underlying philosophy of sex as commodification. Our speaker is left to navigate her way through this new Poland, flipped like the tornado-thrown bus in Dubrow’s “YouTube” poem. Because flinging a nation so quickly and jarringly from one extreme to another cannot come without casualties.… (altro)