Lichen Loves Stone
Jen Crawford took up a creative writing position at the University of Canberra in 2015 and also had her first child, Theo. Until recently she taught at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and before that, at the University of Auckland. She was born in Aotearoa, raised there and in the Philippines, and hold a PhD from the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her book Koel will be published by Cordite Books in early 2016.
Lichen Loves Stone
By Jen Crawford • 2015 • $10
Design by Jeff Sanner
In Over Hear, Lisa Samuels describes Jen Crawford as “a transcultural poet whose poems think with the body.” They also think through lush word-sounds toward the world existing outside of us: lichen, stones, weeds, an abandoned house, flies. Crawford’s poems live in the pivot “between the seen unfelt and the felt unseen.” This chapbook provides a good introduction to the important work of a poet born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, who has also lived in the Philippines, Singapore, and now Australia.
from Lichen Loves Stone:
Promise
I love you you come back,
hatches undog, ants
stream the rope out
of loose husks in the hold
it must be you, come back
as ants, as honeydew uneaten by ants
dripping onto the trees,
sooty mould swarming
over the stems and leaves. exhausted,
seasonless, vigorous
cascade,
adorn me to meet you
as formic acid, as shells bleached
out in an ungroomed place,
the springing up of a stinging tree
as swelling belly,
ruin, the lack
of a canopy gap