Virtual Craft Chat with Poet Jane Huffman
Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Jane Huffman to discuss her debut collection, Public Abstract. Jane is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore.
Jane Huffman’s debut poetry collection, Public Abstract, was the winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman first book prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere, and she was the recipient of a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Jane has her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a PhD student in literary arts at the University of Denver. She is founder and editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal.
About the Book
Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Jane Huffman’s intricate debut collection, Public Abstract, examines illness and recovery, loss and addiction: the ripples of influence an addict has on their family circle, and vice versa. We watch as a private mind, devoted to its privacy, is laid out on the page and abstracted to become a public revelation. Building an aesthetic of compressed interiority, the speaker’s tension is clear—“From one lung, I tell the truth. / From the other lung, I lie.” Through intimate and meticulous poems, Public Abstract explores the operations of form, sewn together, and the failings of form, ripped apart. Crumbling under its own weight and folderol, form becomes an act of invention and in Huffman’s expert hands, revision becomes a genre.
