EVERYTHING WE MET CHANGED FORM AND FOLLOWED THE REST
Horse Less Press, 2016
Doll Artists: ShirrStone Shelter
Jessica Comola’s debut collection marks her as a poet for whom language is stranger than truth. Her ear tells her things the eye cannot perceive, and she shares those rarely heard cadences with us. These are talky, disjointed, oddly moving poems, whose quasi-coherent speakers offer elliptical observations about a wild-ish world suspiciously similar to our own. Let them make their mark on you.-- Evie Shockley
J.C. is not kidding. Everything changed when I met this book that “[does] it for real” and now I know the world to be a conjured trick and Comola its real thaumaturge, busy wizard of wonder and the recency. These poems solve the world for the X it might should become, render a possible restoration of all that being reasonable and having a sense of self—a sense untrue because of its programming, a mere sense of a mere self in mere time and mere space—corrodes. Someone has made for you a magical study in and of the “input contents” in which states are achieved that warrant new words, “so there’s more to uh-uh” but also to “o-ho” upon its delivery. There is joy in the vord, get into it, to these “manifest voices directly preceding visionary extasis” that follows from reading this book. And it’s funny.--Jane Gregory
A brilliant rejoinder to the mindfuck of existence, Jessica Comola's wicked language hack defies orientation. It comes at us a glowing mathematical incantation of alternate personhood, witchy humor, and suprahuman knowledge. I'm not coming back.--Danielle Pafunda
A funny, mournful contempo apocalypse-narrative—Ezekialesque, lightly; fast-morphing Rimbaudian prose, spangly; Celanian neologisms, cast conversationally. These poems are fancy, not in an imagination-on-the-cheap sense but in an astral-observatory-at-the-online-mall sense:Comola’s “I” is an avatar in an infinite game riven with glitches and challenges, where our world’s data-driven imperatives are reflected in cosmic-funhouse style. This book is huge, brainiac fun, and it reads dizzyingly fast.--Catherine Wagner
