The Fry
Jacqueline Waters
The Fry
Jacqueline Waters's fourth collection confronts the ways we push each other around, hoping for a little win, settling for the slow diminishment of our souls.
The book’s preoccupations include the vagaries of authority, the tendency to sweep everything under the rug then wonder why the rug's not flat, intergenerational chaos, sudden medical detour, and an ill-advised passion for healing. The tone is sinister, yet amusing, offering one more handhold as we near the end of our ropes: “We can’t have knowing looks / (we’re both as good as dead) / so we have these knowing lines, typing till the clock says stop.”
"But I only love you / because I love / my contempt." Like happening upon an old porcelain and discovering it depicts cruel, near comical scenes with a great precision, in a style that is pointless to try and place historically, fine China made in America—that's The Fry. Some if not all of these poems are a song. And the plates the book talks about come from Ikea. These are lines of unmistakable value, in which the antiseptic violence of our homeland makes a cool hard surface—they are relaxed yet unnervingly purposeful, like the way the times are going to do themselves to you no matter what—they don't need (which is why they never asked for) your consent. Jacqueline Waters has always been new to me, these more than twenty years I've admired her. An adventurous, diamond mind—her perception remains immaculate, seemingly immune to what it sees and knows. "None of these gods / get near enough to cheapen." That's why we're all so angry here in America.
—Ariana Reines
I can’t exactly tell you how funny I find “Interview,” how moving I find “A Ruse,” how lovely and bewildering I find “What Might Good Be,” or why I keep returning to the writing in this book as if to some deep, wild need. What I can tell you is that I’ve been preoccupied with—or maybe “occupied by” is a better way to say it—the poems of Jacqueline Waters for the past quarter century and that they only get better with time and attention. Each is singular, but they all—and always—have a brilliant and plain-spoken strangeness. I do believe they’ll never go away.
—Graham Foust
To open this book is to be recruited to a dysfunctional team, for shadowy purposes, under a capricious and possibly disapproving leader. It’s not that you don’t trust your vaguely familiar comrades, but every time you try to communicate, a horde of readymade phrases intercede to thwart any chance of a pact, and there you are, “just two / collegial / enemies / enduring the false conspiracy / of the shared umbrella / on a wild, windy night.” The elements of relation, in other words, appear in their dizzying parallax. There’s a moral education dispensed in Jacqueline Waters’s soberly devastating, sui generis poems, and yet that makes them sound general, so that it’s all the more disconcerting to realize: “This is not aimed at anyone / but you know and I know it’s YOU.”
—Matt Longabucco
Waters’s poems ask, when do we stop performing ourselves, our desires, our fears, and when do we become them. Is the answer always or never?
—Laura Henriksen
Jacqueline Waters is the author of three previous books of poetry: Commodore and One Sleeps the Other Doesn't, both from Ugly Duckling Presse, and A Minute Without Danger, published by Adventures in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Chicago Review, Harper’s Magazine, the PEN Poetry Series, and on Poets.org. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, she lives in New York City and works on the digital team at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Some links are available at jacwaters.com.
Paperback
96 Pages
5.12 x 7.95 inches
ISBN 978-1-959708-18-6
April 23, 2026
Distribution: Asterism Books (US) • Public Knowledge Books (UK)
Genre: Poetry
