“Kleinberg uses found text and collage as a way to shed that outer, borrowed layer of language and style, and to get closer to her own understanding of womanhood.”
J.I. Kleinberg's debut poetry collection, She Needs The River, is an elegant and intelligent meditation on being a woman. Kleinberg uses found text and collage as a way to shed that outer, borrowed layer of language and style, and to get closer to her own understanding and experience of womanhood. The publication includes a visual Afterword by poet Emma Filtness and it will launch on March 18th.
Praise for She Needs The River:
"At turns serious, playful, and evocative, Kleinberg combines a distinctive voice with a signature style. Poetically, the accident of the enjambed texts appeals to the reader with a kind of inevitable sense. Visually, the torn paper is familiar, tactile and inviting, punctuated by shifting fonts and bursts of color. Reading Kleinberg is an entirely new experience."
—Sarah J. Sloat
In J.I. Kleinberg’s tactile poems—moving like torn-paper watertrails, branching and rejoining—we find ourselves just downstream of E.E. Cummings (syntax/silence/restraint) and Gertrude Stein (rooms/rhythm/desire). She Needs the River leaps the banks of fear and containment, running with joy and wit: here, accidental phrases (“lush mouthful of sun,” “brilliant pussy,” “the world a peppercorn”) become as polished and slick as riverstone. We are carried away in this torrent of found and necessary beauty.
—Nancy Pagh
She Needs The River by J.I. Kleinberg
First edition of 150
148 x 210 mm
72 printed colour pages
ISBN: 978-1-8383206-5-2
Launched: 20 March 2024
Poem Atlas (London)
In the unrelenting battle against doggerel and sloth, J.I. Kleinberg wields recycle bin, magazines, x-acto knife, and glue. Her visual poems, which explore the accidental syntax of unintentional phrases, have been published in print and online journals worldwide. An artist, poet, freelance writer, and three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA. Her work was featured in a solo exhibit at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, in 2022 and in The Cutting Edge: Art of Collage in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2023. Chapbooks of her visual poems, how to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press, Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023. She is on Instagram: @jikleinberg