Media Kit for Download

Media Kit: Jenne’ R. Andrews, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, Finishing Line Press 2013

For Immediate Release:  Local Poet Writes  “Little Book with a Big Heart”

Contact Info:  970-214-9941, jenneandrews2010@gmail.com

Colorado poet Jenne’ Andrews announces her first collection in thirty years, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY . The volume Andrews describes as “a little book with a big heart” contains fifteen free-verse lyric poems rich in the imagery and iconography of place-- her beloved Rocky Mountain West and in particular, the Cache la Poudre River valley where she has lived for most of her life. 



The new collection has its own web site where sample poems, reviews and commentary are posted. For readings/interviews contact the poet at jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Advance Reviews – Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love . 

Nationally lauded poet Jim Moore, Invisible Strings, Graywolf Press 2011, writes of Andrews’ new collection:  “The underlying grace note of this book is love: love of all kinds, for the present body and the lost past, for the wandering surprises in a given moment, for the deep certainties and even deeper questions that both stain and illumine a life in poetry.” 

Dawn Potter, A Poet’s Sourcebook: Writings on Poetry, from the Ancient World to the Present, Autumn House Press 2012, comments, “Jenne Andrews' poems are saturated with color and with music. But more importantly, they overflow with feeling: a deep, unabashed commitment to the knife edge of joy and heartbreak.

"We are the small and temporal things appearing / in the corner of your eye when you flash past," she says. Such lines are a version of suffering; they rail against invisibility. Yet though she declares, "if I knew who I am, or who I ever was / or might become, I would be at rest," the reader understands that Andrews's restlessness is at one with her music. They are interwoven elements of her work and cannot be separated.”

Cover: Mirage, mixed media on Bristol, the Midwestern artist John Sokol. 

Poet Bio

A longtime Fort Collins resident and self-described “charter Rist Canyon earth-woman,” Andrews spent seven years in St. Paul, returning in 1978 as an up and coming young poet: in 1974 her first book was published by Robert Bly, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was appointed Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools.  Between 1978 and 1988, Andrews earned Bachelors, Master’s and Masters of Fine Arts degrees at CSU and taught writing at CSU and the University of Colorado.

She raised sporting dogs in northern Larimer County for nearly twenty years, losing her mobility in a fall from a horse in 2007. Now, anchored to her desk, she writes poetry, memoir, novels and blogs at La Parola Vivace and Loquaciously Yours. A highly engaging interview with Ms. Andrews appears at the web journal Writing Without Paper in the July 2010 archives


Excerpt from the Collection:

From the poem Voluble Dusk:

When the old mares pulled a night wagon
over day’s end, she tucked me in;

she was mother then, and her moon face
came over me and I touched the cheeks

of the moon, and its soft dark curls,
and watched her mouth move with lulling

rhymes;  I remember them; she would bathe
me, scrubbing me on a towel on the bed,

later holding my head in warm tap water
to lather my hair; I would cry, and they

would laugh and scold. Not long after,
the desert dark of madness folded long

wings around her; days and nights
of absence then, before her return without

tears or laughter. Forever afterward,
her face would shine in the crepuscule,

a luminosity that lingered there while 
I sat at the piano, tentative girl learning

Schubert and Brahms.  She listened in her
cherry platform rocker and drank;

to forestall our severing from one another
in the voluble dusk,  I played on. 


Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2013


Blackbird Amore

They manifest like a sprinkling of ash on the dawn,
congregating motes from a far heaven.

They are annunciations in blue black, shimmering
in the young cattails, the wing’s red badge

that says, I am of the garrison of joy and I have come,
and I am not Icarus and I am not a barn swallow,

nor am I a disconsolate sparrow with her half-hearted
motet, or the barrio crow clacking for scraps,

or the furtive owl sitting high in the oaks
like a jaded bartender.

I sing Verdi, you sing Mozart. I sing today
and you sing tomorrow.

We are the small and temporal things appearing
in the corner of your eye when you flash past,

warbling in our epaulettes, strafing the marsh
to route the hovercraft of the dragonfly,

trumping the laggard lark with our midair
pirouettes-- ballet rouge in the empire of love.

  
Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2013


Colorado poet Jenne’ R. Andrews








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