Objects in This Mirror: An Anthology of Legacy

Objects in This Mirror is a compilation of poems from fifty-seven former students who shared space and time in a rare undergraduate workshop that ran continuously for forty-six years at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga under the guidance of poet Richard (Rick) Jackson. These students went on to study at top MFA programs, and then to publish, edit, and teach. They include two Guggenheim Award winners, a MacArthur Fellow, a Whiting Award winner, an Academy of American Poets University Prize winner, a longlist for the National Book Award, a Theodore Geisel Award winner, a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and other honors.

Review :
Objects in This Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear reads as a wild and elegant testament to the power of poetry, and to the power of a poetry community: this poetry community. The poems in this anthology speak to the poetry of our place and decades, and will continue to do so far into the future. -Laura Kasischke If you were lucky enough to get around sometime in the last thirty years to the legendary writing workshops directed by Richard Jackson in Chattanooga, then you'll know how rich and original a gift they were to American poetry.This anthology is both a record and a living testament to the legacy of influences offered through these workshops and the Meacham Poetry Festival-influences that were often international and always a rebuke to the 'know-nothing' streak in American poetics. There was nothing quite like it. It doesn't seem likely that there'll be anything like it again, not anytime soon anyway. Most of the poets featured here are still making work though. Happily for us! All gratitude to them for going on so, and for bringing it all back home. -David Rivard I am not easily inspired in my old age. It is rare anymore that reading a book makes me want to put it down and write something of my own. This anthology, however, was a different experience. It made me proud that I have devoted my life to writing and teaching. And it put me in touch with the early wellsprings of my own work. I think it has something to do with the levels of passionate energy and ambition that are so clearly present here. For over forty years, UTC's writing program, and the Meacham Writers' Conference associated with it, have been world-class places for young poets to study and come into their own. This rich, varied, consistently surprising anthology is a testament to that important work. There are voices here, modes of perception, logic and structure, certain to speak to everyone. I highly recommend it. -Mark Cox Inside on half-title page Objects in This Mirror breaks and heals in the same heartbeat. Intensely personal, surreal to tragicomedy, ranging in structure from free verse to elegantly formal, the wonderful amplitude of the poems collected here interrogate intersections between worlds. A calm turbulence helps the traveler navigate roads and pathways that lead beyond the known, then back home again. Elegance as it would be defined by sculptors and engineers, these poems design and build, but give no easy answers. Electric ekphrastic strategies illuminate the power of place. This is the story of Jackson's students, as they are called, deciphering the poetry of streets and rivers and roads that cross and recross over into the harsh kindnesses of Ljubljana, Munich, Venice, Vienna, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Split, Rome, London, Cardiff and the cities of Southern Germany's Romantic Road. This collection is a "Book of Crossing" boundaries and borders: Portugal, Poland, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland. The forecast-aftermath contained, here, within the context of these back-and-forth pages reports the barometric pressures of stepping and re-stepping across lines. Objects in This Mirror presents to us a theatre of un-behaved voices. Clap and finger-snap a standing-room-only ovation as the Commencement Class of Richard Paul Jackson makes its way to the center of the stage. -Earl S. Braggs