Catchment Area

In a voice subtle yet distinctly confident, playful yet composed, this debut collection by jena Schmitt draws together influences from poetry, prose, biography, art, architecture and history into a perceptive study of the forces that shape our physical and emotional landscapes. At times these forces are quiet as "sleet that turns to rain/that turns to snow," at times unyielding as a child who throws himself down in a tantrum. Catchment Area captures glimmers of those instances when, just as a variable like an earring or glove could solve "any number of unknowns," the earth shifts---whether due to memory or relationships, natural phenomean or human invention---leaving an absence that "cannot be mapped." These poems call on our own sense of this absence and search for meaning, bringing us to a place of possibility, a place to "revel in/the parts that are/missing: heart and mind/like phantom limbs."

"Jena Schmitt, whose first published poem appears in The Fiddlehead, takes the Don't Stop A-Rockin' prize for her elegant, unusual `Quiescence,' a neurotically beautiful examination of the ways in which `meanings...change without notice."'---Lynn Crosbie, The Globe And Mail