Mature poems with their finger on the pulse of the dark side of the present.

Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn's masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky's photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.

"Edge effect" is an ecological term that has to do with the effect on an ecosystem of the juxtaposition of contrasting environments. The poems of Edge Effects have their connection to ecological matters, but they also ride other sorts of edge throughout, entering an unstable reality in which both time and space are given to uncanny shifting, so it's "easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon / among many."

Many of the poems in the book are inspired by paintings and drawings, but none of them is the standard ekphrastic exercise: Jan Conn's poems go deep. They are reinventions of often hyper-real environments — astonishingly rich and mobile, nightmarish, splintered, fragmentary and afflicted by flux. Readers of Edge Effects will be stirred by an involving, non-coercive, witnessing art of great power.

Peony Vertigo is Jan Conn's tenth book of poetry. Her poetry has received a CBC Literary Prize, the inaugural P.K. Page Founder's Award, and in 2016 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a member of the collaborative writing group Yoko's Dogs whose publications include, most recently, Caution Tape (Collusion Press, 2021). She works full-time as a Research Scientist and Professor at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, NY and State University of New York at Albany on the vector biology and evolution of Latin American mosquito vectors. She is also a visual artist. She lives in rural western Massachusetts.

Jan Conn's profile page

"[Jan Conn's poetry] is embedded with contrast and contradictions, is harsh and pliable, full of starlight and fire and blood, and yet she achieves equilibrium that knocks the reader off kilter: look up from the page, steady yourself, and you are changed." - Janet Grafton, on Botero's Beautiful Horses

"For all of her scientific - I mean, accurate - observation, Conn arrives, surprisingly, at mysticism - Conn is a poet for thinkers who dream." - George Elliott Clarke, Maple Tree Literary Supplement

"This is thick, complex work, alive with art and magic, spiked with intricate structures of ecological and epistemic context, in mesh with vibrant lived experience." - Edie Steiner, The Goose

"This is a book to read, re-read and keep." - Jean Van Loon, Arc Poetry Magazine