Praise for A Violet, A Jennifer

“Jennifer Badot’s beautiful book starts in a childhood house where doors of abuse open and close, but where, in the woods behind the house, the girl becomes a “wild knower” with a need to speak. Speak she does, in these heartbreakingly spare poems in which every word counts and many words startle. Moving through adolescence into adulthood, Badot at last reclaims her childhood, bringing together her “girl body,” her green “poem body,” and her “woman body.” In the end, “every poem” is “a door / a door opened”—for the reader as well as the poet.”

— Martha Collins, author of Because What Else Could I Do?

“Even your wound is a mask / over the older, original wound…” writes Badot in her book, A Violet, a Jennifer. The poems are powerful, sad, beautiful, and heart-wrenching. Throughout this collection, there is rebirth after pain and grief, despite an underlying horror. Badot’s poems heal the heart. “Whatever I build now / will be makeshift, a place / so susceptible to freedom / I won’t even sleep there.” No matter how many scars are left, there is no ability to hide them but to wear them well. These poems do just that. This is a book to read again and again.”

— Gloria Mindock, editor of Červená Barva Press, author of Ash

“Jennifer Badot’s simmering, tensile collection blooms on the bookshelf.  “I am a flower,” she writes, which is the voice of the speaker, the poet, and the book itself.  What seeds. What buds. What stems.  Poem by poem, she honors, “the love and amen of the tangible world.”  Our poet is frank: “I am petrified of men/and murder.”  Our speaker is: “a wild knower.” Badot casts her spell with these poems, in original sound and intent to make a modern secular, melancholy, mischievous, gospel: “I shawl your sharp/shoulders, spit/your flesh, spill/you wild honey/spell you wrong.”  With language fresh and weird like Hopkins, tight and cryptic like HD, Badot — a girl, a woman, a single mother, a lover, a maker, a worker, a thinker, a survivor, a joker, a dancer, a cook, a gardener, a poet — attends her tasks with this charm: “hush, hurry, heal.”  These poems coo and coax, water and nurture dreams.”

—Spencer Reece, author of Acts, The Secret Gospel of Mark, The Road to Emmaus and The Clerk’s Tale