Jennifer Franklin’s If Some God Shakes Your House reinvigorates our collective archetypes by marrying them to harrowing, personal, contemporary content, "Like holding a blossom that becomes the whole world." Franklin’s weaving of the political, the intimate, natural and human history, and visual and literary ekphrasis is visionary, tragic, and grand. Each dimension buttresses and expands the possibilities of the next, and it takes all of it, the apocalyptic harmonies and disharmonies, to belt out what this speaker carries. At the epicenter of it all is the ferocity and woundedness of the mother. "Every ersatz saint knows / endless sacrifice / is suicide. For twenty years, // I have been disappearing," she writes in the book’s final poem. The greatest artists sing through disappearance, and beyond it. Even as some God shakes her rafters, Jennifer Franklin sings.
—Diane Seuss
“Once I discovered / home was a lie I told myself,” Jennifer Franklin writes, “I shoveled the dirt to bury my life.” These poems — at once brutal and blooming — speak in the voice of a modern-day Antigone, a voice filled with soil and song, a voice strained by the burdens of gendered kinship duty and state violence. Franklin’s work moves across the boundaries of the mythic and the mundane, the mother and the child, the scarred body and the exalted promise, the prose poem and the sonnet, the womb and the tomb, the living and the dead. She instructs us how to hold ourselves and our beloveds — wretched and wondrous — through our living, dying, earth-bound days: “Anyone can throw // a corpse below the ground. It takes love / to prepare a body for the earth.”
—Deborah Paredez
Urgent, tense, and fateful — Jennifer Franklin throws her voice in these taut lyrics and prose poems that view her own experience through a dramatic lens, the voice of Antigone come back to face the rockiness of our moment and the inevitability of death. This serious, unremitting book will leave you shaken by the furies, the randomness of destiny, and the gravity of life.
—Edward Hirsch