and Melancholia
A winner of the Essay Press Chapbook Contest
Through anaphora and vignettes, and Melancholia diagrams the multiple facets of grief, most importantly the duality of despair and desire, even as the love-object and relationship escapes and decays. Wes Jamison’s essay mourns a burning city while it grieves a relationship not yet ended, creating what Julie Carr describes as “the story of how words, especially the detailed and measured words of poetry, forge a psyche to forage within.” and Melancholia performs the symbiosis of language and body and Chicago through a “seductive” narrative and a “painfully vertiginous self.”
from Introduction
“Wes Jamison’s epistle is…the story of how words, especially the detailed and measured words of poetry, forge a psyche to forage within. More specifically, and Melancholia shows us the alchemical process whereby language, beaten to a shine, begets desire and its partner: remorse.
“The excesses, both emotional and lingual, of this essay/poem/letter feel both Elizabethan and Victorian—and Melancholia is shadowed by queens, one who refuses love and another who mourns it. And speakers from both eras could have been tapped for epigraphs for how they re-commend the inventive power of the word.”