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Professor Jenne' Rodey Andrews, M.F.A., is a highly regarded American poet, critic and memoirist. Recent work has appeared in former Autumn House Publisher Michael Simms' Vox Populi (over fifteen poems) The Passionate Transitory, Belletrist Coterie, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere.

Andrews' current ms of poetry Beautiful Dust was a finalist for the 2014 Autumn House and she recently withdrew the work from Salmon Ltd, Ireland to protest unmoderated bashing of American writers by Irish writers on the press's social media pages.

Her most recent collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, lauded by Robert Bly and endorsed by poets Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick, appeared from Finishing Line Press 2013. A booklength collection Beautiful Dust was 2014 finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and solicited by Salmon Press, Ireland. Turning on work set in the West and her native Southwest the collection is under submission to 2019 publication prizes.

Andrews is currently hard at work on two new memoirs: The Shame Garden: A Woman Writes of Isolation, Despair and Self-Redemption, which in intensely wrought and imagistic prose poetry chronicles the anatomy of shame; it is the poet's late-in-life tour d'force, sending the reader through Dante's circles of hell, the sewers of Paris ala Les Mis, mano a mano confrontations with the Alien mater familias, fusing literary and vintage cinematic works in an elliptical dance with human history and experience of being Other. The poet has no idea of what will become of this work but hopes it finds a home as memoir with a small press.

A four part interview with Andrews went live at poet Maureen Doallas's blog Writing without Paper in 2010.

Other collections include the full-length Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, edited and published by Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.

Her work has been anthologized in Heartland II, Northern Illinois University Press, 25 Minnesota Vols. I and II, Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, Women Poets of the Twin Cities, Oil and Water and Other Things that Don't Mix, and elsewhere.

Essays have appeared in MPR's Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Twin Falls Times News, and miscellaneous journals.

IIt is Prof. Andrews' belief that one's collection of poetry must be judged on the quality of its craft, voice, and language, not its themes.


With Mr. Bly the memoirist Patricia Hampl wrote a forward to her first collection and is considered the "mother" of the modern American memoir although she arguably shares this title with Mary Karr for Karr's The Liar's Club. Andrews mentored Karr in Minneapolis when the former was circa 19.

Professor Andrews has had an illustrious teaching career at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado where she taught prelaw students in the making of argument and the issues-oriented seminar The American West. She was the highest rated instructor in the University Writing program during her tenure at Boulder.

Currently Professor Andrews writes daily at age 70, having been rendered housebound in 2007 in a fall from a horse, at home with her lover and companion of thirty years the fiction writer Jack Brooks, ten new poems a month, and is working on an additional memoir about her pioneer roots, "Territory Fever: The Story of an Albuquerque Family," posted as chapters are finished to Loquaciously Yours where the poet has produced over 450 essays in the past decade on a variety of topics as well as book reviews. Upcoming: a review of Ethna McKiernan's new Salmon Collection.

Ms. Andrews is also a Civil Rights Advocate advocating in 2019 for the civil rights of the poet Ping Wang who recently won the AWP Award for Memoir.

In 2015, after a long battle, Andrews extracted her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Colorado State University, begun and finished in the 80's, self-advocating under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact Andrews was instrumental in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's approval of the MFA at CSU.

She is a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship, was short-listed for a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and was full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools from '74-78.

She lived in St. Paul from 1971-78 during the first wave of the Twin Cities literary renaissance, one of the first poets to inaugurate The Loft Literary Center, co-founding Women Poets of the Twin Cities which as noted boosted the careers of Mary Karr, Ethna McKiernan and others, and spent the summer of 1973 in Reggio Calabria, Italy which gave rise to the "voluptuous prose-poetry" memoir Nightfall in Verona posted in entirety here, designated by arts maven and former friend Caroline Marshall of NPR The Writer Reads as "fabulous."

Circa 2010 Andrews also founded a poetry group on She Writes which included Dawn Potter, Katha Pollock and other noteworthy writers, and supported the work of Meg Waite Clayton, fiction writer in addition to mentoring a number of other up and coming writers.

There is no way to estimate the influence on the lives and work of the some 12,000 students k-12 she met and encouraged in the seventies, but the poet James Tolan has attributed his career to her work as it was anthologized in Heartland II, Lucien Stryk, Editor. Professor Stryk read the title poem of In Pursuit of the Family on NPR.

As noted the poet lives in northern Colorado's Poudre River Valley with her husband, fiction writer Jack Brooks; the couple's daily life is centered around writing and enjoying their beautiful imported Golden Retrievers;-- see the Ardorgold website for details. Contact: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Signed copies of the Blackbirds Dance collection, endorsed by James Moore, Patricia Kirkpatrick and Dawn Potter, are available from the poet. She posts new work below and is available for mentorship and virtual readings via Skype.

She is happy to critique ms. of poetry, fiction and memoir for a small fee.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

New Poem: The Boys of Juarez, Posting for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond

The Boys of Juarez

“Or maybe we retell it
So the ashes are still riding around
In that stolen car, coaching life’s desperados;
In any case, the top is down, under
A cargo of stars.’

 “Black Beauty”, Dear Ghosts, Tess Gallagher

Yes some of us do have stories
of our desperado years,
the eating of ripe fruit after curfew,
or the winter we carried someone’s ashes
around in the car,
or collided with desperados themselves,

like the kids from Mexico,
who one summer day,
ate plums on the roof
of the trailer next door--
I had picked cactus spines
from their feet,

and wrapped one in my old comforter
while he shook with a fever
that passed—his lips
so parched and pierced
from sucking fetid juice
from the saguaro, and his sisters

back in Juarez waiting.
Miguel.  Miguelito,
my one, as if back in my love’s arms
in Minnesota, out in the barn,
in the fragrant loose hay,
lifting my hips in rapture


I had conceived a son,
born him in a dream, he had grown
from my arms to take wing
and now come back like his father’s
double, young chulo with olive skin,

dark eyes, a thick crown of black hair,
eating the dark rich plums, spitting their pits
down to the summer grass.

The seeds lodged themselves there
so that one day when a tree brings on
its green and arrowed leaves
and the blizzard of white blossoms
it sheds before the waking of the fruit,

the boys of Juarez will be remembered
for their planting by the half-charred 
moon's light,
that phased and holy
lamp that lights the misbegotten’s way.

They don’t clear their plates
much less rinse them--
they leave the pork chop bones
for the flies that come and settle
thick as unhulled sunflower seeds
on the table of the unrepentant,

and those that live
by  scavenging
for carrion.
And in the tarry air of day’s sweltering,
we pop Coronas and they sing
O Corazon que te vas,

and then the older one Roberto
has sudden tears, tiny diamond rivulets
through the near-soot of desert dust
streaking his face,
making a coal miner’s mask
around his eyes.

They had bathed in the river
and didn’t care if they were clean
or not; jacketed in sweat,
I make chile and carry it to them,
and they sop it up with tortillas.
The candle burns down and now we

celebrate their first days in America
drunk, raunchy jokes about sex
por toda la noche, all night;
I see the wild horses in their eyes,
hunger that flares
when someone is well fed

and I pull back,
before the Carmen in me
gives herself to them,
the harlot in me lifting her red skirt
away from her thighs,

and think then of the INS waiting in the dark,
the unmarked vans and the turncoat Latino cops,
their careful necklines where the razors
have come and gone, the clipped mustaches,

the sunglasses poised on the aquiline nose,
and the aguilar eyes, eyes of the eagle,
scanning the dusk for those
who look like themselves,
so dark and strong and young and full of hope
marching on toward the river, to sleep there

in the arms of its green breathlessness,
and on the latitude
of what they imagine
as a true and ripened
freedom,
as if they are safe.



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

*Aye, Corazon, que te vas—
Oh heart, why are you leaving…

7 comments:

Maureen said...

Wonderfully told story in this poem, Jenne. Too many good lines to mention. The imagery, as always, vivid and evocative of scene and feeling. I like how you carry and develop the image of the seed and fruit, making these metaphors for the attainable and the forbidden, for the having and the denying, stand-in for love and county and freedom. I also like the descriptions of the young chulo echoing in the "turncoat Latino cops". Your trademark use of animals to carry meaning remains exceptional.

Brian Miller said...

a bit of a dance with the wild boys...really vivid portrayal of not just hem but their lifestyle...lots of great touches along the way bring them to life jenne

Timoteo said...

Stunning. Again.

PattiKen said...

This is like looking at my preconceived notions from the inside out. It's not a comfortable view, but perhaps an important one. Well done.

Unknown said...

Really nice piece here. Love the images you painted here. Really enjoyed. Thanks.

Mystic_Mom said...

Wild horses in their eyes.

Brava Jenne, brava! You've done something really amazing with this piece. I love it!

Anonymous said...

This is a wonderful piece, Jenne - the empathy and the vividness, the miner's mask about the eyes, the cactus, the son that might have had, the red skirt, the tree, the chile, the hunger, the INS with their manicured shaves, on and on, well done. k.