Tender, Tender

Winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize

"Whatever she wants/is never too much" begins the title poem of this sensuous, incantatory collection. As the speaker woos her beloved, the reader is wooed alongside her-by turns thrilled, stunned, and sated. I love the intimacy here, the nimble prosody and the deft image-making of Tender, Tender, which reads like "what a sun god must taste/when it eats a galaxy."
-Julie Marie Wade, judge of Charlotte Mew Contest

Opening the pages of Tender, Tender is like getting to slip beneath the sheets-of paper, yes, but also of more intimate cottons and aethers, earthly and celestial. Its poems are unafraid to tread into intimate, spiritual spaces, moving between love, lust, loss, and mourning. The poems are inquisitive without being prying and romantic without the pitfalls of sentimentality. Jewell's handling of form is fittingly tender. She touches the lyric line as though it were a beloved's body, and we are invited not only to feel this touch, but dare reach out for it ourselves.
-Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of The Many Names for Mother