Collected Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781952939402)

I crawl the earth
for useful scraps
like silver-pointed stars,
now pressed,
into a wash of evening sky
invented just for me,
or so it seems,
intended for us poets-
still relevant,
dancing in the glow.

The Collected Poems of Ariel Jastromb chronicles the development of a young poet through searing moments of tumult and grace, pain and ecstasy, longing and the desire to be free of longing. This paperback edition comprises two volumes previously published as limited edition hardbacks. Volume I, A Declaration of Existence, contains poems written when Jastromb moved from Chicago to New York and found her spiritual home in the rock clubs and glittery-glam vintage shops of the Lower East Side, and in the dark in-between places of the city. Some of these early poems are confessional and searingly personal. Jastromb "orbit[s] obliteration" in Manhattan while experiencing "pain so excruciating it sparkles." Other poems exhibit a deeply Metaphysical bent, traveling from the pearls and jellyfish of the deep to the "frenzy of stars" above. The journey culminates in the final poem, from which Volume I takes its name. "A Declaration of Existence" is Jastromb's manifesto and her song of herself.

If Volume I is about finding a poetic voice and asserting an identity, Volume II-Lighting up the See-finds Jastromb, newly confident in her craft, channeling a multitude of voices and identities: Ophelia, Joan of Arc, Marianne Faithfull, Emily Dickinson. These are, loosely, ekphrastic poems-from the Greek ek (out) and phrásis (speak)-in which Jastromb contemplates, and complicates, works by artists she considers kindred spirits: Rimbaud, Nick Cave, Lynda Benglis, Kurt Cobain, and, above all, Patti Smith. Cindi Sherman, the shape-shifting "self"-portrait photographer whose works query the nature of identity and gender, also looms large; a series of poems inspired by Sherman's photographs includes the image of a "shimmering blanket"-a luminous scrim that both protects and reveals. In these poems, Jastromb, like Sherman, cloaks herself in fabricated identities that, paradoxically, allow her to channel a truer voice.

These poems are "little prayers" and "neon psalms." Jastromb travels from the sublunary depths of the sea to giddy heights of "celestial glitter," and yet her poems never lose their grounding in her deeply felt humanity and desire to connect. The poet David Berman wrote, "It was the light in things that made them last." Ariel Jastromb passed away before seeing the publication of these volumes; she lasts through their luminescence.