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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.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

New Poem





Amanita Verna, The Death Angel mushroom 

The Road to Heaven

This body has torqued to another shape
than the woman's that I knew.   It ships in water, 
it is rudderless, without a keel  

So that it is not even a sea-worthy craft. It is waking as pain
incarnate, a thin stream of fire from the small of the back,
down the leg, someone else's dark dream writing itself on my bones
like Christ's side-wound in the painting in the Prado--

A  wound that leached down his white belly, under the cloth:
sacred blood.  Secret fire. 

I befriend the pain, lifting my leg high up in the night
like a tree, a ghost of flesh and tendon and bone
by the flickering light of the news of the terrorist compound ,
I catch a glimpse of the bodies there, in the contorted code
of death, lips blue and thick, seas of blood behind the heads
cloying.

And then, rage at the indifferent others. Jihadist blood congeals
like tar: perhaps the blood of betrayal is darker, like Gulf oil
suffocating the tortoise, the pelican. In the channels of pain,
the burning in the marrow, the body folds itself up

Like the amanita verna in the forest,
the death angel mushrooms of our souls sprouting in the loam
we shrink back, like a shroud in the shadows.

And if we are out of reprieves, out of the postulated
matin of the rip cord kicking in at the last moment, give me
a good goodnight... rock me in morphine's arms,
a nun in murmuring solicitous nearness, like a mother.

My father whispered on the telephone that he couldn't go on
and that night I took his breath, thimbles of it.  At last,
the dark sputum in the blue porcelain sink, the working gills
of the spent man hunched over the counter-- occluded.

And I leave you to plant strawberries in the arid ground,
to battle the garrisons of mustard weed choking the garden.
To watch the erupting blue channels in the flesh
little semaphores in a tunnel of fading light: look closely-- this way. 
Come with me, this way.

cc


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

4 comments:

James Rainsford said...

Wow Jen, what a powerful and profound piece. There is so much in this poem. It is authentic, intelligent and deeply moving. Thank you for sharing. James.

Anonymous said...

very much enjoyed the opening of this...how true, how a woman's body becomes not her own in age..you've conjured some wonderful images..I'm partial to the dark, ergo, your death angel mushroom is a quiet 'delight' in this piece...love that stanza in which it appears ~ angela

Steve Isaak said...

Perfect, love this.

hedgewitch said...

An exploration of pain and the conundrum of its purpose is never wasted, though it may waste the writer. As always, your immense gift wars with darkness and ends embracing and rejecting it simultaneously, or so it seems; the amanita, the poppy, the worm, all as much children of nature as the butterfly and the heartbreakingly beautiful and indifferent sea.