Bøker av Reka Jellema

Touch Drunk is the debut collaborative collection of Australian and US poets, Brendan Bonsack and Reka Jellema. In the foreword, artist Angie LaPaglia writes, "From separate hemispheres they confront melancholy, pain, longing, loss, and love head-on, tenderly, and together. The resulting poems are so intimate that in reading them, it's easy to feel like you've stumbled upon a sacred place, a hidden cloister that you enter reverently, gingerly, as if you're not sure you should be here. You should."

Like the best short fiction, this exquisite collection of poems by Reka Jellema questions what it means to be human, and to survive unsayable loss. The author examines how as creatures we carry on "this living." Can we ever be close enough? Poems pay attention to "the bones we build our lives around," visit cancer wards where mothers demand resurrections for their dying children, unwrap intimacies between virtual strangers like fortune cookies. Every creature populating these poems has a reckoning - the wings of birds rise only to slam the air down. A dog senses the ghosts of her lost comrades, sniffing for "the life that got away." Lazarus stays buried - and yet the poems hold tenderness for all who have ever suffered and look toward art and creation and community as redemptive.

At the Edge of Forget is not a traditional collection of individual works. Rather, each poem has been crafted in a long-distance collaborative process between two, three, and even all four authors, from Michigan to California, USA, to Melbourne and coastal Victoria, Australia. The work explores memory and friendship, passion and love, death and grieving, and much in between.