Jessie Janeshek's chapbooks Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish and Rah-Rah Nostalgia are forthcoming from Grey Book Press and dancing girl press respectively. Invisible Mink is her full-length collection (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008).
My latest full-length, NO PLACE FOR DAMES, is available for purchase from Grey Book Press!
Hardscape is out from Reality Beach; Channel U is out from Grey Book Press; MADCAP is available from Stalking Horse Press!
“Even the most experimental poems tend to tilt their hand at some point, not Janeshek…In the works that now comprise a trilogy of sorts, Invisible Mink, The Shaky Phase, and MADCAP, Janeshek has launched one of the most subversive literary offenses since Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.”
—James Diaz, from a review published in The Collidescope
“Jessie Janeshek’s MADCAP (Stalking Horse Press, 2019) is a poetry collection with the soul of a surreal neo-noir film directed by David Lynch and starring Mae West as the hard-boiled detective. It’s a mystery wrapped in faux fur, wandering through a jagged and smoky past like it’s a hall of mercury-glass mirrors. It seeks clues to answer haunting existential questions about the eternal entanglement of beauty and violence. To track down leads, it conducts seances with the spirits of Old Hollywood starlets, their voices phasing in & out like staticky radio waves on West Virginia mountain roads, their sentences cut up & reassembled by the ghost of William S. Burroughs.”
—Joseph P. O’Brien, from a review published in Queen Mob’s Teahouse
Jessie Janeshek's four full-length books of poetry are NO PLACE FOR DAMES (Grey Book Press, 2022), MADCAP (Stalking Horse Press, in 2019), The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017), and Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). Her chapbooks include Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), Channel U (Grey Book Press, forthcoming), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming). With Jesse Graves, she coedited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press 2008).
“If you don’t adore The Shaky Phase you are doomed. I’ve been reading Janeshek’s gorgeous poems for years. They fill me with baroque joys, vertigo, and envy! She is one of the best poets of her generation.”
—Peter Jay Shippy, author of A Spell of Songs