The Medium

Jenny Molberg is the author of three previous poetry collections, including The Court of No Record, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College and the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares.

"Jenny Molberg's The Medium explores, but never simplifies, the layered intertextualities of women's art, aesthetics, biography, and autobiography, while staying true to the 'constant private noise' of poetry's lyric core. The collection's rare intellectual breadth does not quash the concentrated intimacies of each individual poem. Elaine de Kooning is both a concrete and allegorical presence in the poems, representative and real. She is a medium, a sieve, an image, an interpreter, and a parallel to the brokenness, brilliance, embodiment, and imposed invisibility of Molberg's grandmother Sue; women artists of the twentieth century, several of whom are represented here; and the ever-fierce art monster, Molberg herself, who frames the art with formal and imaginative magnificence."-Diane Seuss "The Medium is a stunning act of reclamation. With immense care and attention, Molberg recenters women who've been relegated to the margins of personal and public memory, filling the archive's void with language that honors our rage, our grief, our humor, our queerness, and all that history owes us."-Courtney Faye Taylor "Anchored by the presence of painter Elaine de Kooning-through her relationship with, portraits of, and letters to the poet's grandmother-The Medium unfolds as an intimate, intergenerational conversation between art and memory. The result is a work of striking formal daring and unflinching intellectual and emotional acuity."-Caridad Moro-Gronlier "The Medium excavates our hiding places and honors our full selves, even our shame. This is a collection of big, grape-jelly-scented, queer love, unfolding with a rare emotional precision. Molberg captures the difficult work of keeping a heart safe while making room for tenderness, forgiveness, and the possibility of being known."-T Bambrick