Waveland

The word “lush” doesn’t even begin to describe these poems. And boy, do we need lushness, especially these days. The world empties us out, and only poetry can fill us up again. In one poem, the speaker lies on a bench in a park and when a groundskeeper, mistaking her for a homeless person, asks her if there’s something she needs, she says yes, yes, I need everything. Are you hungry, reader? Open this book, then. A feast awaits. 

–David Kirby

There is a buoyant and inviting quality in Ösel Jessica Plante’s debut collection Waveland that keeps me reading in riveted fashion these wise poems of a younger poet. There exists humor here and contemplation of human relationships in their complicated and various landscapes of place and time. Most of all Plante’s Waveland embodies a spirit that transforms experience into something stunning and deeply moving.  

–Stuart Dischell

In her debut collection of poems, Waveland, Ösel Jessica Plante reminds us of how the world insists on making us targets of its desire: it woos us with its beauty and then departs, leaving us no choice but to keep loving it with language. Here, every poem is profound in its linguistic imagination, every poem a flash of lightning illuminating the shadow of what we are missing: a marriage, a daughter, a lost fire. What we truly find after reading these poems is the joy of aching for what we think our lives should have been: “Let my mouth / move against your emptiness until you utter back to me /the sounds I most want to hear.” Read these poems, for they’ll fill you with music you’ll want to hear over and over again. 

–Octavio Quintanilla