Jody Gladding is a poet and translator, with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Michon. Her most recent poetry collection, I entered without words, appeared in 2022 in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Her awards include MacDowell and Stegner Fellowships, French-American Foundation Translation Prize, Whiting Writers’ Award, and Yale Younger Poets Prize. She lives and works in East Calais, Vermont.
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Stone CropPoemsFrom"Spell for Not Entering into the Shambles of the Gods"
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
Stone Crop:Poems -
Stone CropPoemsFrom"Locust Shell"
The locust thought
she’d die, she laughed
so hard.
She didn’t
but her sides
split.
Surprised
she lay
dazed, dazzling;
she was beside
herself
or what had
up till then
given her
definition.
It doesn’t mean
anything. You
can take it
lightly.
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Stone CropPoemsFrom"Footwork"
When Nijinsky died, they cut open his feet
to find the secret of his dance. His bones,
it turns out, were like anyone’s.
With each step, our heels sink that much
deeper into earth. We have
nowhere else to go. Once my mother
crossed and recrossed an entire field
to find my sandal. Now she’s gone;
she left her darning.
Stone Crop:Poems
"Gladding writes with astounding freshness about essential daily acts that millions perform. That freshness derives in part from the wholeness of her vision (and, one imagines, her life), in which mothering and birthing, for example, are indissoluble from writing. Rooms and Their Airs is a nourishing work." —Poets' Quarterly
“Jody Gladding’s poems are original, beautiful, and fierce, sometimes enigmatic, but never gratuitously, only faithfully so. They bring to their world (our world) a unique mix of light, lightness, and depth: a world in which human feeling is not all the author’s concern—but more rare, like the human face in Bernifal.” —Jean Valentine
"Jody Gladding limns interior and exterior worlds like no other. Words atomize on the page; pacing itself becomes a radical and spiritual force, elemental as the trees, stones, landscapes, skies, which infuse these meticulously exploratory and wondrous poems." —Laurie Sheck
Selected Works
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