Midnight
in the Guest Room
Poems by Jan Bailey
A stunning new poetic voice of the South celebrating the joys
and losses of women’s lives
Winner of the Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Prize from Kalliope Magazine
Winner of the Elinor Benedict Prize in Poetry from Passages North
Magazine
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In Midnight
in the Guest Room Jan Bailey locates the “bliss of the
routine” experiences in women’s lives—childhood,
love, marriage, sexuality, birth, child rearing, aging—and
transforms them into moments of transcendent power and beauty.
With uncommon wit and sensitivity she offers us poems about the
pleasures of a woman’s soft and unstylish belly; the fierceness
of mother love; the desolation of a miscarriage; the hilarious
illusion of sexual healing; the unexpected eroticism of breast
feeding:
from 'Mornings in the Blue House:'
She draped her newborn like a sheaf of peonies
across her lap, peeled back the blanket from
the puff-ball face, then parted her robe, pinched
her nipple and settled in her daughter there
and something sweetly sexual rose between
them – the pressure, the release – and she fell
fully into love, holding nothing back
as with a man, whose wounding begins
as soon as he cries Baby and rolls over.
Rooted in the landscape of the south, celebrating the private
treasures to be found in the everyday world, her poems speak to
us all of the joys and the losses of the seasons of our lives.
“Jan Bailey’s book begins with an ode to the belly,
with its “frayed mapping of desire,” and travels from
that intimate core through a meditation on the body as it is filled
and transported by love and time -- desire and marriage, childbirth
and loss, the strange transformations of aging. Like the speaker
who sits up late reading in order to “drink the everyday
of other women,” Bailey is hungry for the texture of the
body, the great communal chain of lived experience; these sensuous,
physical poems join her to that current of being.”
--Mark Doty
“In shapes as solid as cut stone and as brilliant as gems,
Jan Bailey’s Midnight in the Guest Room is powered
by a headlong intensity to bring back alive what it’s like
to be alive. Her poems have the confronting yet yielding power
of the nude. The living one, the one the artist modeled her work
on.” --Jack Myers
“The voice of the poems in Midnight
in the Guest Room is a woman’s voice speaking in clear,
strong measures of universal human experiences-- loss and recovery,
love and anger, parental joy and regret, the erotic and the contemplative,
wonder and certainty. Jan Bailey’s poems are a pleasure
in their honesty and openness, in the art of their language, in
the breadth of their vision. The gift of this book belongs to
us all.”
--Pattiann Rogers
“Language
is compatibly married to world in Jan Bailey s felicitous images
and music, in lines as strong and lovely as her ropes of wisteria
/ wide as a woman's thigh. She celebrates the sensual in the complex
lives of women; but she never shrinks from sorrow with his sharp
scythe of gray, nor from anything.”
--Susan Ludvigson
 Jan Bailey grew up in the foothills of South
Carolina.
The author of two highly acclaimed volumes of poetry, Paper
Clothes and Heart of
the Other: Island Poems, she is a recipient of the South Carolina
Arts Commission Fellowship in Poetry. She holds an MFA from Vermont College
and divides her time between South
Carolina,
where she is in the Creative Writing Department of the
Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, and Monhegan
Island, Maine,
where she teaches poetry workshops. Twice
nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is the winner of the
Elinor Benedict Prize in Poetry from Passages North magazine
and the winner of the Sue Saniel Elkind Prize from Kalliope
Journal.
Leslie Ullman Praises
the Poetry of Jan Bailey
CATEGORY: Poetry
PAGES: 90
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9728984-0-9
PRICE: $14.95/ Paperback Original
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