Derivative of the Moving Image (Hardcover)

"Jennifer Bartlett has created not a new form of surrealism, nor of magical realism, but a kind of supernal realism which leaves room for dreams, visions, and angels as well as the panoplies of both country and urban life. These "realia" attribute a marvelously textured, immediate, and linguistically inventive ground to all she writes. The overcoming, without fuss, but with a brave, almost saintly decorum, of a young venture far too burdened by tragedy and disability is the deep subject of this book: a life has visibly been saved, and built, by poetry. One welcomes with delight this brilliant new talent."--Nathaniel Tarn

"Bartlett speaks for and with her generation's anguish at an existence where love is the residue rather than force of feeling between people and events. There are no myths, rites or symbols, no sanctuaries outside of movies, which allow one to experience a rapture of separation from the real. The poems in this collection articulate the situation with great honesty."--Fanny Howe

Of course, I wish I had done it differently when I saw you with her,
but then again "hysteria is the soul voyaging."
Instead of coldly leaving to wander the vegetable aisle, trying to bring you back into this world. Rain is so
difficult to capture on film, no matter how you light it.
It was as though we had to walk though
the scene again and again
in altering gradations
until you found the right movement,
the right way to get it down.
--from "Derivative of the Moving Image"