Streets As Elsewhere is where everything and everyone is absorbed by the place, where 'This empty house listens to its landscape'; 'Dust as it is seen is swept inwards/ as a dream at noon.' The inhabitants are as discarnate as those in Pedro Paramo, ‘. . . a woman walking up the dusty road. / Straight uphill.' '. . . wild bees in a memory of women stretching fabric.' The sound tunes to its surrounds—crows in the afternoon, April thunder, crickets—and to smells of overcoats in rain, cognac and persimmons. A subtle disquietude attaches to a sense of belonging; a strange magnetism alleviates an equally potent sense of estrangement. So much braided hair, so much so much dust, so much rain. J.L. Jacobs has conjured a language for her distinctive world. The poems linger and beckon. The silvered reader enters from behind the mirror. The book tenders a strange exaltation.
—CD Wright
