Salamander presents Disambiguation,
a chapbook by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the 2024 Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award winner. Generously funded by Suffolk University’s Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Fund, this award is given retroactively to a poet who has not published more than one full-length poetry collection at the time of their publication in Salamander. This award is named in honor of Louisa Solano, former owner of Cambridge’s Grolier Poetry Bookshop and a champion of poets and literary magazines. The award includes a monetary prize, a reading with the judge of the contest, and the publication of a chapbook of original work on Salamander's website.
The judge of the 2024 Solano Award was Stephanie Burt, who said this of Jen's work in Salamander Issue #56:
This world can become hard to bear—we may feel our cupboards are bare, or fear baring our souls; we may find it full of headaches, and turn to Bayer, or feel less bear than wolf, incessant bayers at absent moons, like Callisto, Saturn’s satellite, once taken for a potential har-bor of extraterrestrial life, its heavily crated layers of ice the color of beer. I’m riffing and playing with sound here rather than addressing the embodied unease, the shakiness and the hunger, that Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s pair of poems embody, because the body is just a subject; so are intimacy and girl-hood, charisma and lust and a need for connection, and fear. Anybody with a body can take on a subject. Jabaily-Blackburn has a style, a way to bring language into the space we share, a language that sounds like nobody else’s yet, a play of words that renders memorable her serious cares. It’s not just a body, but a body of work I plan to follow closely. And it starts right here.
Find Jen's chapbook, Disambiguation, here.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, was selected by Christopher Citro as winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize. Her recent work has appeared in or is coming soon from SIR, Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall, and Couplet Poetry, and her poems have twice been selected for Best New Poets. She is at work on a series of mixed-media blackout poems, hem, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of Perugia Press, and she is an associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center.
