Plan B Audio

Excerpts from Plan B Audio, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s new book-length poem, were published in Poems: New & Selected (Isobar Press, 2018); here is the complete work. The book was written during, and in response to, a life-threatening encounter with illness, and in the aftermath of the radical surgery that saved the author’s life. This is not, however, a documentary or an autobiographical work, but rather an extraordinary book-length collage of lyrics, phantasmagoric narratives, beautifully honed language work (and play), lament, mourning, fables, demented quests, chronicles of out-of-kilter hospital routine, fierce humour, sadness, anger, love, pain, loss, and survival. It is a work of enormous formal variety, full of powerfully focused writing. The book is illustrated with a series of striking photographs by Susan Laura Sullivan.