The Elements
In tightly woven yet ludic lyrics, this collection of five long poems mines tropes from embryology, morphology, and silent film to consider the first and lost causes at the foundation of a personal, social, and historical life.
$22.00
November 2026
ISBN 978-1-959708-22-3
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Jean Day
The Elements
In tightly woven yet ludic lyrics, this collection of five long poems mines tropes from embryology, morphology, and silent film to consider the first and lost causes at the foundation of a personal, social, and historical life.
Day enlists elements of plant, animal, and psychological human life to ponder little-p politics, distressed personal and world histories, optimism and its opposites, delivering her takes on evolution/dissolution with a tragicomic edge. In Day’s poetic-scientific investigations, jellyfish and “premodern thoughts” transform along slant logics and rhymes into figurations of identity and experience—an apple becomes a pear, then a new version of creation. At the same time, these five long poems put pressure on forms of knowledge and on conceptions of the “natural.” “Morphology makes us strange,” Day says, but it also makes us complicit in the sheer implausibility of human life as we know it: “Yet geometry's no less in the head / than a series of jerks / as we emerge from the water wet / to find ourselves / butts of a formal if not rational / concern.”
A new book by Jean Day is always a cause for celebration, and The Elements is worthy of a weeklong festival—a stunning, magisterial addition to the oeuvre of one of our finest poets.
—Kevin Davies
In The Elements, Jean Day uses temporal fragments, facts as symbols, and the accretion of pieces through the lens of the political, the historical, and the scientific. Not the female or male gaze, but the plant’s gaze. The future’s incompetence and the past’s unreliability. A beginning you let go of, erased. “You do your ceremony / but the fates do not attend.” Closure is a pun.
—Carrie Hunter
In these crystalline, witty, revelatory poems, Jean Day opens the world to us at its most fundamental level: the elemental constituents of persons, environments, communities. In doing so, Day interrogates why certain configurations of matter, labor, and life are given value, while others are discarded or overlooked. But work such as The Elements doesn’t only uncover the networks and infrastructures of exchange that shape us; it takes a hammer and chisel to them. As Lyn Hejinian once wrote, and as this collection evidences, “Each element of the work, every particular, exists as a point of encounter, rather than of separability; each particular serves as an intersection, a portal, a source of energy.” Through The Elements, we hold the potential for exchange on entirely different terms.
—Mia You
Arguing with politics, media, the fables of history, putting humans on the creaturely plane and looking at us there—“queer as a snail” that builds its shell without “recourse to a plan”—this is a book from which you learn stuff: new words, the habits of plants, film editing techniques. The natural world, its images and promises, are appended in lovely-ugly ways to “present wretched conditions” as lines braid, helix, coil, curl in sometimes-riddles, sometimes-slogans, sometimes-jokes, but always urgent in their task, which is to show us the more life that surrounds, subtends, supports, makes possible any life at all. “Not just neat analogy,” Day writes. “Everything’s attached on some subterranean level.” There’s a kind of warm, flinty cadence to these poems, which are wise about the conditions under which wisdom struggles. Like aphorism, like science, like criticism, like dream. Beautiful thinking about the contradictions of person, having to be one among others, the terrible costs of our human experiment, the violence but also the endurance and esprit. I’ve long admired Day’s poems for their prudent and utopian visions. The Elements is another of her gorgeous books.
—Hannah Brooks-Motl
Day's poems are intensely musical, lyrical, but they also show how—if a poem is the "graph of a mind moving," as Philip Whalen put it—the poet always has a song in her head.
—Jason Morris, Brooklyn Rail
Jean Day is a poet, editor, and (retired) union activist whose involvement in the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene spans more than four decades. Her recent books include The Night Before the Day on Which (Roof Books) and Late Human (Ugly Duckling Presse), and The Elements (Winter Editions). She was executive director of Small Press Distribution in its early days and subsequently worked for many years as associate editor of the humanities journal Representations. She lives in Berkeley, California.
Paperback
152 Pages
5.12 x 7.95 inches
Edition of 1250
ISBN 978-1-959708-22-3
November 5, 2026
English
Distributed by Asterism Books (US) • Public Knowledge Books (UK)
Genre: Poetry
