On the Cave You Live in (Paperback, 1st paperback ed)

Poetry. ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN is Philip Jenks' first full-length collection. His poems are both intimate and strange, encompassing personal history and the politics of Appalachia, epileptic seizures and Baptist glossolalia, memory cells and Kentucky coal mines. His cave describes the limits of what's known, and his poems explore the "spaces between the aura and the jolt." "At various turns hieratic and profane, their blur the blur--in equal parts--of the confessed and the prophetic, these poems direct us to the language that starts just past 'that point/ where nothing is not.' Cassandra lives there; and Stein--and so does Philip Jenks"--Carl Phillips.