Books
Winner, 42 Miles Press Poetry Award
We Can't Tell If the Constellations Love Us (poetry)
"Oakes's is one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry...This is a daring, risky, and tender new collection."
—James Crews, editor of The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection & Joy
"This new collection defamiliarizes the physical, psychological and political violence of our time, creating an uncanny space for us to hear “the trees filled with cellos / playing the names of the living.” Keep this book close. These songs for imperiled life will help you navigate a way to refuge.
—David Axelrod, author of Years Beyond the River
Winner, Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature
The Chief of Rally Tree (novel)
“Inventive, smart, and often hilariously funny, The Chief of Rally Tree delivers a social critique both searing and sly.”
—Ann Pancake, Whiting Award winner
"The Chief of Rally Tree is THE book for this moment in our lives, in our history. In it we witness lives earned and lives stumbled into. A woman leaves the world of humans to live among and help distressed trees. The characters are wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful, and through them we open ourselves to wonder."
—Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner
"In precise, gorgeous prose, Jennifer explores the shifting lines between civilization and the natural world. Her fallible and endearing characters reveal our humanity in all of its strangeness, culpability, and power. A striking novel of humor and deep empathy."
—Megan Kruse, author of Call Me Home
Winner, The Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
The Declarable Future (poetry)
The poems in this sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous collection inhabit a world uneasily familiar, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. Among these poems, doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world’s harvest is whatever swims too close. Throughout the collection, precise, observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous, precarious wilderness of The Declarable Future.
“I can’t remember a recent book so inhabited by a spirit of unease about where we find ourselves now....her poems don't describe so much as embody this disquiet. This is a wise book by a talented poet.”
—Bob Hicok, author of The Legend of Light
“Here recent scientific breakthroughs collide with intimate family life, ethereality with the quotidian, and, when we least expect it, the theoretical plane drops off suddenly into the abyss of the too, too real. In these poems of pith and sizzle, ‘Love [is] finding fleas in the fur of our sisters.’ Sisters, you may believe it.”
—Nance Van Winckel, author of No Starling
Winner, The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
The Mouths of Grazing Things (poetry)
"In a clear, muscular language loaded with precise revealing metaphor, Jennifer delivers a world. These are poems of a mature poet deeply engaged with her environment, demonstrating again and again the power of language to surprise and delight in moments of true insight."
—Sam Hamill
The Mouths of Grazing Things is a lyrical meditation on nature's forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, and magnetism that follow. Jennifer translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar sings to an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish among the barber's sweepings, and the players at "the most dangerous playground in the world" prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar.
“Delightful, that such complexity of mind should be given to us in such lucid packages."
—Albert Goldbarth