Jessica Rigney | Without Map
POET . ARTIST . FILMMAKER
From your mouth
Come flying
Sweetmeats–
A fine fish
Knifed lakeside
Hung from arms
Outstretched.
We are the same
You and I–
Mouths agape
Throats full at
Mere thought
Of things swallowed
And swallowing…
Something Whole
Desire’s unexplainable swings between grasping and letting go—such are the divergent courses of my new collection. Short rhythmic pieces drenched with the moodiness of lust’s confusions as well as the body’s clear ache, are interspersed among longer free verse works which tell the stories of lovers in layers of loving and leaving. This is as much a book about desire’s sighs as it is about its threads of sorrow.
Rest. less. waves – silvered. westered.
Poetic Film
My work with film is an extension of my poetry, linking sound, words, movement, visual symbolism.
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About Jessica
Jessica Rigney’s poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, South Broadway Press, Wolverine Farm Press and others. Her work is included in these anthologies: Thought For Food: An Anthology Benefiting Denver Food Rescue, Dwell: Poems About Home, and We are the West: A Colorado Anthology.
She is the author of Follow a Field: a Photographic & Poetic Essay (2016), Entre Nous (2017), Within Poetic Boxes (2018), Careful Packages (2019), and Something Whole (2021). Two poems, À la Brütt and Grass Began, exist as limited edition, letterpress broadsides by Wolverine Farm Publishing (2016 and 2017, respectively).
Jessica was a quarter-finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2016 and 2018. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. She lives and wanders in Colorado and northern New Mexico, where she films and collects feathers and stones.
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Jessica Rigney 