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Winner of the 1995 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
"There is a mood—connected to solitude that is not loneliness and not despair, but that feels like it could turn into either if you did not try to love the world, or at least look at it attentively. This book seems written from that place. It's a book to be read slowly and quietly, if you are to feel your way into its deep sadness and its small, sudden well of joy."
—U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass in The Washington Post Book World
"In her extraordinary first book The Lord and the General Din of the World, the truths Mead tells have less to do with the sights, smells, and sounds of a place and far more to do with the taste of loss, grief, and madness in a community that has spun out of control. . . . We, the readers, eavesdrop on a passionate internalized debate that is about no more and no less than the question of whether or not we should live and, should we choose to, how we might go about it."
—from the Foreword by Philip Levine
"Mead's thematic concerns . . . are ambitious, and her language more than lives up to the project. Indeed, Mead's language is so freshly constructed, so nervy, that she is able to transform topics that may seem merely sensational in the hands of a lesser poet—for example, drug addiction—into art. . . . Jane Mead proves herself to be an exceedingly lucent and thought-provoking lyric poet."
—The Gettysburg Review
"[Mead] employs taut, colloquial language and firmly places her personal history against a searching, almost existential understanding of the world . . . . [She] pinpoints, and gives form to, tenuous, seemingly nameless emotions . . . . That precision gives her poetry, though often spawned of rough subject-matter (addiction, abuse, suicide and profound isolation), the power of expertly cut gems."
—Publishers Weekly
"Crossed and recrossed with a plain speech that is haunting in its directness, Mead's language firmly places the fact of suffering back on our plate. Jane Mead is well deserving of the literary prizes she has won, and her first book is well deserving of many readers she is sure to gain."
—Booklist
Jane Mead was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College and in the Iowa Summer Writing festival. In 1991, State Street Press published her long poem, “A Truck Marked Flammable” as a chapbook. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers’ Award.
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