What the Boys Did
Some of them stuck their fingers
right in my mouth or up my nose
to prove they were Buddhists,
I think, though I don’t know how
that proved anything.
And lent me their clothes – they
enjoyed seeing their winter coats
swarm around me, as though
I were a star and their coats
the sky.
They all made tapes and pressed
music, books, and films on me, and I
pressed back, and then after a while
we all got bored, and wanted
to have sex and get married and
never speak to each other again.
From A Day in Boyland, Ghost Road Press, 2007.About the author: Jessy Randall is the Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College. Her poems have been hung from trees, etched into birdhouses, quoted in library advertisements, made into rock songs, and sold in gumball machines. She lives in Colorado Springs with her husband, two young children, and sister-in-law. This is her first collection.Feature story: 11/8/2007Colorado Springs Independent
Excerpt from feature:
Indeed, Randall’s poems read like happy little vignettes. In one poem, the speaker plans on buying a llama farm, making millions selling llama-fur sweaters and using the money to buy a spaceship.
Randall’s also quirky when it comes to enjoying her poetry. While many poets say they’d rather hear a poem, Randall says she’d rather read it. For one thing, she likes seeing the shape of a poem on the page, the simple shape of lines in their tidy, little squares. And she doesn’t like poems with a lone line that sticks out farther than the other lines, creating the appearance of what she calls a “diving board” in the middle.
Review: Rattle.com, by Josie Mills
Excerpt from the review: “The climax of the collection comes for me long before the narrator finds true love in “We Rang the Bell at the Restaurant”–it comes when the narrator reveals her system in ‘The Ugly-Nightgown Life (Someday You’ll Be Happy Again)’:
According to your the old system,
each minute you put in as a couple
meant the next minute was more likely.
You thought you were guarding against being left,
or leaving. You thought, two years, two
and a half years, three years, three and a half–
this is forever.
…
In the new system,
every day of solitude
is a promise that someday you’ll be happy again.
“This notion of shoring up the days of a relationship against aloneness, of accumulating them as a measure of commitment insurance is the moment I search for in poetry–an insight into the truth, into something we’ve all thought without realizing it. The uncertain optimism of this poem is characteristic of most of Randall’s poems–the narrator does not wallow; she laughs.”
Blurbs: “Jessy Randall’s poems arrive like gifts when it isn’t even your birthday. Witty, deliciously bite-sized, frisky, strange and real as dreams, these are poems you will savor and show your pals.”—David Graham
“‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ Gauguin wonders. If you can’t wait to see how it all turns out, skip ahead atop Jessy Randall’s fresh, intimate, hospitable, trail-blazing vision. The charm of these poems wards off the past and the present, to take up residency in a primal, post-modern future: Boyland, in specific, a world of of misheard Björk, pears erupting from volcanoes, and children flying up the stairs to bed. You get seasick just standing still. These are the poems of the alien child of James Tate, Russell Edson, Richard Brautigan and Lee Upton. Four thumbs up.”—Leonard Gontarek
