Poetry: The Hyacinth Letter by Jenn Morea

Please join us to celebrate the release of the poetry collection The Hyacinth Letter by Jenn Morea, who will be joined by poet Lida Maxwell.

Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Masks are required at our in-person events.

In the quietest of ways it is concerned with the largest of themes. It has—perhaps from Celan, Dickinson, and Niedecker—this astonishing ability to make of the emotions an elemental space. In this way, the relational concerns that course throughout the series of poems become not merely interpersonal in nature, but oddly, subtly, gently, cosmic. That allows “night” and “darkness” to gain the phenomenological importance they here carry, but allows them to be realized in the poem not through any theoretical apparatus, but through a sense of intimacy, through the personal. That is a true gift—and one given to the reader in the most accessible of ways. There are very few poets writing today (that I know of at any rate) so invested in the metaphysical and writing in that tradition with such lightness.

—Dan Beachy-Quick

Rachel Carson wrote her “hyacinth letter” to my grandmother to explain the “lovely companionship of your letters” which provided for her a “white hyacinth for [her] soul.” For those of us who find joy and solace in nature, in loving friendship, in the expression of soul in words, Jenn Morea’s poetry is itself a lovely companion to be greeted again and again.

—Martha Freeman

Rarely have I felt so invited into the world of a book of poems, and yet so often like an intruder—a welcome wanderer at the edge of its fields, watcher within its rooms, listener beyond its walls, dweller beneath its stars—blushed and compelled to both witness and belong to something so intimate and yet familiar in its vivid expression of a pure and delicate human desire to speak.

—Mark Turcotte

Jenn Morea is a poet and teaching artist who has taught with the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and with two dozen community arts organizations. Her book, The Hyacinth Letter, was awarded the 2024 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry from Headmistress Press. She is the lyricist of the Candy Claws album Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time.

Lida Maxwell is Professor of Political Science & Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She is a political philosopher who is interested in how intimate experiences and feelings like queer love can help us create ecologically vibrant and pleasurable political futures. She is the co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso 2018) and Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling (Oxford, 2019), among other books. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Baffler, and Jacobin.