Review In Jade Rosina McCutcheon's first published collection, we encounter an art fair that "arrives / in hottentot orange heat / and settles like a peacock / feather on an emerald field"; we observe a bag woman who gathers "galaxy dust / bag by bag"; and we contemplate a woman at a Melbourne train station who waits "for a / spirit beast / or a medicine woman / to follow the tracks / on her arm / make sens ...Full description
Review In Jade Rosina McCutcheon's first published collection, we encounter an art fair that "arrives / in hottentot orange heat / and settles like a peacock / feather on an emerald field"; we observe a bag woman who gathers "galaxy dust / bag by bag"; and we contemplate a woman at a Melbourne train station who waits "for a / spirit beast / or a medicine woman / to follow the tracks / on her arm / make sense / of her life." The imaginative poems in this debut chapbook give us a first sample of McCutcheon's penchant for striking and often surreal imagery. Here, words call to us, evoking "a madrigal circus of apricots / dressed as sirens / in the distance."--Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, Petersen, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, has been the recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award and Willamette Writers' 2013 Distinguished Northwest Writer Award About the Author Australian born Jade Rosina McCutcheon holds a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She graduated from N.I.D.A. Sydney as a theatre director and has worked as a professional director in Australia and the United States as well as in many Universities. Her publications include books, Awakening the Performing Body, Embodied Consciousness Performance Technologies, Narrative in Performance, chapters in edited, peer reviewed volumes and poetry in Australian magazines. She was awarded second place in the Kay Snow Poetry Prize (Oregon) for her poem 'Fair Art' in 2019. She also has three poems published in Terra Incognita (Bob Hill publishing 2019). Jade lives in Salem, Oregon with her partner and their Australian Labradoodle.