Red Ocher

About

Finalist, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

Author

Jessica Poli is the author of four chapbooks and coeditor of the collection More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser. Originally from Pennsylvania, Poli is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Reviews

“Jessica Poli’s debut collection, Red Ocher, stirs with its reverential questioning of ritual, boundary, and expectation. … Ostensibly, the ideal audience of Red Ocher are those who are interested in the human relationship with nature, but really, this collection is for all of us who have felt, or need to feel, an ending transform into a beginning. Perhaps ultimately, Poli’s collection illustrates how a collapse can lead to an expansion, leading not to an expansion of knowing, but of the true beauty of not knowing.”
–Grace Johnson, Colorado Review, February 2025

“Poli’s first full-length collection is a lyrical, elegiac contemplation of loss, yearning, and unrequited love, a slow burn of a book that will lodge itself inside you as lived memory.”
—Nancy Miller Gomez, Ecotheo Collective, January 2025

Praise

“In Red Ocher, Jessica Poli juxtaposes two rich and seemingly unlikely veins of obsession—that of farming and animal husbandry and that of emotional and sensual intimacy—to create truly refreshing poems about mortality and deep affection. Indeed, what we see in Poli is a poet of tremendous skill. It is hard not to be impressed with her command of detail, her deft use of language to construct, in what are ostensibly specific physical moments, a series of elegiac poems of urgent sentiment and deep feeling. Here is an assured debut of a singular new voice in American poetry.”
—Kwame Dawes, coauthor of unHistory

“Red ocher: a pigment made of rust, of the remnants of collapsing stars; a pigment of the aftermath. And much like its namesake, Jessica Poli’s stunning Red Ocher pieces together a type of holy aftermath, beautiful in its corrosion. These gorgeous, penetrating poems build a somber but sacred world of salvage and care.”
—Gale Marie Thompson, author of Helen or My Hunger

Series

Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.

“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”

Media

“31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023” – California Review of Books

The Mystery and Hopefulness of Poetry: An Interview with Jessica Poli (University of Southern Indiana)

An interview with Jessica Poli at COMP: an interdisciplinary journal

“About the Work” with Jessica Poli – Southeast Review

Interview // “From Farm to Poem”: A Conversation with Jessica Poli – Poetry Northwest