The Plum-Stone Game

Kathleen Jesme

In her third book of poems, Kathleen Jesme asks what happens if the ordinary ways of knowing are taken away—if one is suddenly unable to see or hear or has been stripped of the familiar past. What begins to show through when absence (or darkness) creates a different inner landscape? In five distinct but interconnected poem cycles, Jesme excavates these inner landscapes and discovers word artifacts to reveal new directions to dig, always bringing the reader somewhere unexpected.

“The Plum-Stone Game is a delicate reconstruction of sense-memory and its eros: with archeological precision Kathleen Jesme revitalizes the broken vessel of the world, giving us one beautiful version of its amphora after another. The poems hold; they retain light and joy and the fierce electric charges of the body. Here is a poet who has wearied of the ways in which language has been used to show us the impossibility of meaning. She is refreshingly unafraid of the sensual power of poetry, its difficulties, and its ability to comprehend the larger sphere of being.”—D.A. Powell

“I pay homage to Kathleen Jesme’s The Plum-Stone Game. The meaning and/of its music, the marvelous lexicon. Its playful and moving millefiori. Its singular views.”—Carol Snow