Falling Blues sings about edges and air, about fear, about letting go, jumping, plunging. The poems chart some of the many ways we have of falling in and out (of love, of lines), of falling for and under (spells, sinners, mystics), of falling off and down and getting back up and on again. It`s about what throws and what carries us, what we are given, what we learn and what - and who - we take with us on the vertiginous journey through the body`s mischief, to the stillness we imagine lies beyond falling.

Publication in April, 2010, Frontenac House Press, Calgary, AB

Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems

In this book you will find various tangos: the intense dances of intimacy; the dances of individuals and their angels and demons...

MacEwan Press 2006,; $15.00 ISBN 0-9780453-0-0

REVIEWS
Magic, after all, is magic. Anything can happen and it does in ‘Blood Opera;The Raven Tango Poems’ by Jannie Edwards. . . . The sleek, Raven-black, 62-page volume starts with ‘Raven on the Beginning of Everything’ and winds downs with ‘Raven on Silence.’ In between are a myriad of Tango-influenced poems on everything from gardens, pornography and suicide, to sunsets. There is ‘Judas’ Tango’ in which Christ’s betrayer agonizes over his actions: ‘…his tongue a knotted rope,/ desperate with this need to tell,/this vocation.’ The Pornographer in his Tango has “guileless blue eyes,” and the speaker asks: “What did you expect? Wolf eyes? Ice? His sex is a "knife edge/you want to skin.” The poem ‘Falling in Seven Tangos’ stretches out through seven, occasionally overlapping voices to explore myriad types of falling from night, school grades and exppectations, to drunks, water and lovers.. . . Marked by thrusts and parries, leading and following and incendiary-style connection, Tangos in the book deal with marriage, parenthood and man’s relationship with desire, debt, and much else. Paul Saturley's realistic and ethereal images counterpoint and enrich the poems.
- Christina Grant

 

 

My first book of poetry The Possibilities of Thirst explores the many forms of desire: its compulsions, its perversities, its wrong turnings, and its rich satisfactions. Desire is as singular and as innate to humans as hunger or thirst, yet its urgencies and expressions are many. Robert Hass says: "The reason we call it longing is that desire has such spaces in it." The Possibilities of Thirst explores some of those spaces. Love, the human urgency to create, the desire of poets to write poems that "move the stars to pity"; the need for connection with others; violence -- my poems explore these themes.

ROWAN BOOKS, 1997 $12.95 ISBN 1-895836-45-X

Reviews
The transcendental tranquility of the bowl on the cover of Jannie Edwards' The Possibilities of Thirst, however, cannot prepare us for the way that the words on the pages burst the bindings and spilled out into the reader's lap....
Ripe with teracotta maidens, children full of holes, apprentice listeners and pear-shaped women, The Possibilities of Thirst is fierce with the pulse and rush of life....
The book's rollercoaster ride through the terrain of the human heart is an absolute delight, full of humour, hunger, joy and pain.
- Carolyn Guertin OTHER VOICES Spring 1998

These poems close distance: distance between a Bosnian immigrant and her Canadian host; between those with pierced skin in a darkened theatre and those who watch them; between women retreating in a mountain cabin who find themselves on the verge of ‘knowing something very old….’ Edwards allows us an encounter with the grace that exists all around us when we catch a glimpse of the ‘geometries of the heart.’ A rare sensibility shines through each poem, and Edwards’ insights create for the reader new possibilities of thirst.
- Paul Wilson, author of Dreaming My Father's Body