Simultaneously sad and funny, Jennifer Denrow’s California, explores the obsessive nature of humanity while calling into question how we create our own realities. Using image repetition as a tool to emphasize obsessio...

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Simultaneously sad and funny, Jennifer Denrow’s California, explores the obsessive nature of humanity while calling into question how we create our own realities. Using image repetition as a tool to emphasize obsessions, Denrow’s narrators range from a woman fixated on California to a ventriloquist and his dummy that instructs “You’re allowed to move your lips. / I will teach you to become human…” These are poems occupied with imagination, and how we use our imagination to navigate our worlds.

  • Thoughts echoed in poems: Long lines, short lines mirror our minds' tangents and fragments
  • Recurring images: Speakers' fixation on nature, California's allure becomes a sanity test
  • Speaker's yearning: Not for California, but an imaginative escape
  • Search for meaning: Speakers strive to find significance, despite frequent failures
  • Collection's maze: Blurred lines between dummy and ventriloquist, state and State, in a whirl of language and imagination

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