Fierce confusion and a pitch-perfect sense of humor interact chemically in Jacqueline Waters' poetry. The result of her rueful kindness is the deep surprise that comes from being intensely awake and from paying close attention to "not just the creation of a pattern, / but an examination of the principles behind a pattern." We sense the “scientist” behind these experiments, which are conducted with unflinching curiosity: “Nature is great: it forgot it was chaos.”
Jaqueline Waters is the author of three poetry collections: A Minute without Danger, (Adventures in Poetry), Commodore and One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Dreamboat, Fanzine, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star and The American Reader. Waters is an independent digital media consultant based in the New York City area. She has a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center.
Adventures in Poetry began publishing in 1968 as a mimeographed “little magazine,” and continued through 1976 with individual pamphlets, featuring work by Ted Berrigan, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, and many others. After a long hiatus, it began publishing books by established and new innovative writers that are available exclusively through Zephyr Press.
A Minute Without Danger
A Minute Without Danger
Jacqueline Waters
Poetry
$10.00
ISBN 0-9706250-3-0
“Waters has a precise sense of sound and line, and her insights, both psychological (“By now i am all about respectable stupidity”) and social (“go home young lady / The fun to be had here is not your fun”) are both unpretentious and acute. If these poems “take place,” they do so in that little space between the question of futility and the futile question.” — Jennifer Moxley
“Jaqueline Waters pours cold water on modern poetry’s flagging aspirations and ironies, and kicks up some new ones. Sharp and candid in true urban measure, she lines up variable depths (“as when an unendurable emotion / hits an inconsolable soul”) with edged surfaces (“What is life?... All signs look good.”)…” — Bill Berkson