and MelancholiaWes Jamison
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Through anaphoric speech acts and vignettes, and Melancholia diagrams the multiple facets of grief, most importantly the duality of despair and desire, even as the love-object and the relationship thereof escapes and decays. Wes Jamison’s essay conflates the creatively and grammatically generative, with mourning as its own impetus, creating what Julie Carr describes in her introduction as “the story of how words, especially the detailed and measured words of poetry, forge a psyche to forage within.” and Melancholia performs the symbiosis of the text, the body, the relationship, and the city through a “seductive” narrative and a “painfully vertiginous self.”
AN EXCERPT FROM EP 69 “Whether this place is always already aflame or ought to be, this is the certainty that it is or will be and was, a city all before and subject to wish fulfillment and defense mechanism.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR WES JAMISON is a teacher in Chicago. His work appears in 1913: A Journal of Forms, The Boiler Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gertrude Press, Gone Lawn, and Wilde Magazine. His essay “The Secret Garden” (South Loop Review Essay Contest winner) was selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2013. |