Books
Published works
WAYFARERS
Winner of the Off the Grid Poetry Prize
“We grow old. Our parents die or hang on barely. Our take on this changes color, depending on what afternoon, how angry/hopeless/resigned we get. It’s one of poetry’s – and this poet’s- great, honorable subjects along with time itself, emphatic and tedious by turns. But nothing is left out of this book, not bafflement, not the horrific-gone mundane too often now, not beauty regardless, not even astonmishment. All mark our immediate ancient moment.”
- Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief and Bestiary Dark.
“Who wouldn’t want to rise every day/ with a new warm heart,” Medved writes, asking for rescue and mercy. Wayfarers collects poems that run into rough truths. There’s such pleasure in how many ways these poems take on the resistance of perfection, the “secret crown / of defects” and the exhaustion of parents, each time landing us square in the most honest pockets of feeling. Are we scorched by such forthright testifying? No, we’re seen. The speaker in these poems follows time as “a path or a wheel” and—with vulnerable seeking—moves along, sometimes even to praise. “
- Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of Worn Smooth between Devourings and An Eye in Each Square
“There is so much verve and wisdom in Jane Medved’s Wayfarers. These poems reckon with loss and, more essentially, in living with loss as she wonders if she “can still pass for forty, for fifty” all while recognizing “the indifference/ of gravity.” Medved’s voice is deeply idiosyncratic & delightfully bizarre—“We are the glittering/ beaten promise of gladness—” as she navigates her Family Archive, her country, her religion, and her truest self. “Life,” she tells us, “is propelled by many hungers,” and I find myself hungrier and hungrier for more Medved poems.”
- Nicole Callihan, author of This Strange Garment
DEEP CALLS TO DEEP
Winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press
“Deep Calls to Deep introduces Jane Medved, a poet fully formed who weaves family life with biblical narrative, the ancient desert landscape of Israel with images of a city in a contemporary war. This is a powerful meditation on the notion of safety. Medved asks how we create a sense of it for ourselves in this world that serves up violence in the name of justice or empire or victory. This is a wise and important book.”
—Connie Voisine, author of Calle Florista and Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream
“Taking its title from Psalm 42, Deep Calls to Deep explores the nexus between the depths of biblical history and the depths of the self, and the twin powers of faith and doubt that drive them both. Building from a masterful sequence exploring the legacies of Herod to a final richly lyrical sequence, Deep Calls to Deep becomes richer with multiple readings.
—Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of Y and The Resurrection Trade
“This is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic exploration of the many ways that history—both global and personal—impacts our lives. We are immersed in Medved’s astonishing universes, peopled by Cleopatra, Herod, and magical, warrior women who birth language and carry the burden of lost children. Marked by war and loss, these poems are also reverent, beautiful, and defiant: a woman buried in honey for seven years continues to haunt her husband. A mother mourns her child at a graveyard where ‘boys blossom, box after box.’ With great agility and skill, Medved crafts ghazals, sonnets, and free verse poems that rouse us with sonic pleasures.
—Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
“Jane Medved illustrates how the deepest questions of faith are often asked in the same breath that we utter the most basic questions of the everyday. For every king who gets a story that lasts through the ages, there's a person whose life is forgotten. How do we live with that? How do we allow the oldest stories to be a true lens into our own passion, regret, and fallibilityThese are poems of devastation and daily renewal. What an essential and complicated blessing.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Apocalyptic Swing and Rocket Fantastic
WHEREVER WE FLOAT, THAT'S HOME
By Maya Tevet Dayan, Translation from Hebrew by Jane Medved
Winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize - Saturnalia Books
"Wherever We Float, That’s Home, by Maya Tevet Dayan, translated by Jane Medved is a beautiful book--tenderness and memory come together to give us a lyric voice of emotional intelligence that is vivid and memorable. I loved the deft portraiture in these poems ("your smile--/your two front teeth leaning on each other / like the slats of a broken fence) and image-laden explorations of time (:the wall of the coop behind us is stained with mud. / Time stretches out its long arms and dozes). I loved, too, how the communal voice and individual voice come together here ("I sat on the knees of others. / Their bellies held my back. / Their arms were my walls. / I had a home made out of people). Here is a poet who doesn't shy away from different tonalities, but brings them together in a wonderful chorus which is much larger than the sum of its parts, which is to say here is both a gravitas and light touch here, and when they meet, there is wisdom: "it is so with this life / and my previous lives. / Every time it gets too crowded, / I leave"). One is grateful for this work, and especially grateful to Jane Medved for the beautiful, clarifying translations."
- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
“The reader pauses a moment, goes back and reads the words again. For, despite their simplicity, a shiver of recognition is passing through.
- Yotam Reuveni, Haaretz Book Review
“How many limbs can you take apart/ and still remain a person?,” asks Maya Tevet Dayan in Wherever We Float, That’s Home, her startling poetic account of the losses and gains that shape a human life through its multiple transitions—from childhood to childbirth, moving house and languages, life and death. Jane Medved’s luminous translation carries readers through the seasons of the year, acknowledging the human capacity for renewal in the face of “the forgetful abyss,” and in the process affirming translation’s own capacity to ensure the continuous, revitalizing movement of memory, language, and poetry.
- Adriana X. Jacobs, translator of The Truffle Eye by Vaan Nguyen.
OLAM, SHANA, NEFESH
Finishing Line Press
Jane Medved’s poetry transports the reader to a Jerusalem in which thieves must learn gematria in order to steal, where words and objects are simply states of matter like solids, liquids and gasses. To read these poems is to be in the simultaneous presence of the time-bound and the eternal, for, as Medved demonstrates again and again, what separates the sacred from the mundane is a permeable membrane through which we humans pass back and forth multiple times a day. Reading this book is like becoming equipped with x-ray vision that allows you to see the hidden essence behind every crumbling stone wall, every bag of flour, every street and intersection and ice cream vendor. Do not enter unless you are ready to experience the irrevocable transformation of the world around you.
- Marcela Sulak - author of Immigrant and Of All The Things That Don’t Exist, I Love You Best
Jane Medved’s shattering poems emanate from the quotidian, yet it is a quotidian that recognizes that the sacred exists most vitally in the everyday. In these poems, the makers and unmakers of the world whether Moses, Herod the Great, a mother, or a husband—become real and visible in the face of a child, the glance of a passerby, the ritual of a meal. Medved’s work has as sources Jerusalem, the Old Testament, the heroes and sirens of ancient Greece, yet they exist entirely in the present. Religion, myth, memory mean nothing, her poems suggest, unless they accommodate and arouse the body; unless we can eat, drink, and love among them. These poems, demanding and meticulous in their hunger, call us by name to their table. If we are listening, we eat.
- Sarah Wetzel – author of Batsheba Transatlantic (2009 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry), River Electric With Light (Red Hen Press)
