Intentional Fallacies - Poems by Edison Jennings

Publication Date: June 15, 2021

Paperback, 72 pages

ISBN: 978-1-937968-86-1

$21.95 retail, 16.50 from publisher

A fallacy, the dictionary tells us, is a mistaken belief. Why might we choose to be mistaken, as the title of Edison Jennings’ first full-length poetry collection seems to invite? One answer comes in the opening poem, describing the North Star as “not too bright” and yet “glinting like a battered nail / from which the weight of heaven swings, / and nothing holds the nail in place / except the void it’s stuck in. / For heaven’s sake, old nail, hold tight.” Just so, we hold tight to those things that give us comfort, even when – especially when – we realize there is nothing holding us back.

Not that everything here is comforting, or comfortable. Jennings describes the life of working-class Appalachia with unsentimental, clear-eyed respect. “The coal dust settles everywhere” in “Tipple Town”, where “Daddy drinks and doesn’t care / that mining made his lungs real weak…. //…You don’t see children anymore / in this exhausted mountain town.” And when children are seen, “They’re coal town girls with coal town traits, / their hopes long since tapped-out and sold.” Simply keeping track for bedside prayers requires one to make a list, “with so much need / his knees would hurt, with so much yet to plead.” And this is nothing new: in “Brown-Eyed Girl” Jennings writes of the kinship, deep in DNA, between his “short-lived daughter” (to whom the book is dedicated) and the scant fossil remains of a Denisovan girl whose life was similarly brief. This is what it is to be human. And as a child of the Cold War era of “duck-and-cover” absurdity, he derives three universal rules:

History is a stumblebum god:

1. No one has a shelter.

2. Ground zero is who knows?

3. The fallout will be everywhere.

Animals come off better, and he envies his old dog with her buried bone, even if wincing at “her stiff-hipped hobble-and-squat, / the way she sniffed what midnight offered, / nosed the dirt and found the spot she had clawed.” The “Cats of Rome” are unimpressed by human affairs: “At the axis of the empire, they curl / round Trajan’s column, indifferent / to a fault, at home in a falling world.” Even his old blind rabbit, aware of coming death, “sleeps long and dreams about it / for it is the truth and he knows its secret.”

And then there is love (or perhaps lust), the hope and memory of it. Sleeping on an absent lover’s side of the bed, to “smell the sheets where the weave is richest / with your scent.” One “wants corruption, / the tumble and toss, the press of flesh, the blush and rush and mess love makes.” A widow in her will provides “Give Louanne / the four-post bed now that she’s found a lover, / and dare her to wear it out, if she can.”

Finally, most redemptively, there is family. In his closing poem, “James at 7 & 17” he writes of every parent’s fear for their children’s safety, and yet of the knowledge that there comes the time for letting go: “I watch him dive and disappear / into a wreath of water // until he’s birthed again out deep / and far beyond my reach.” A few pages before, he recalls another moment, of waking to see “my wife and child, composed into one shape, / gigantic night rebounding through the room / while they lie still, curled on the cusp of sleep, / mouth to breast and filling God with God.”

Is it a fallacy to hold onto such a belief? Perhaps so – but that is what makes us human, and makes life possible, even in the face of the void.

Praise for Edison Jennings & Intentional Fallacies

For years Edison Jennings has been quietly and modestly writing some of our finest poetry. Like few others, he recognizes the limits of a poem. He knows what he’s doing, with the music and the meaning. He is both sophisticated and unabashedly direct, a master of the line, of diction, of syntax. His formal poems stand out for their bold rhymes and elegant metrical literacy, but the voice is never cheated, and if he makes every word count, he makes not only a poetry of measure, but a thing bursting with imagination and humor. Finally, the pay-off is that all of his craft embellishes subjects that really matter. Intentional Fallacies is a terrific book.

—Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985-2005

The poems here are finely wrought and rich, utilizing form, meter, and rhyme to confer dignified meaning to local, especially rural life, a life that is increasingly dismissed by the broader culture. In his use of traditional poetic treatment, Jennings implies a claim, namely, that aesthetic value is not simply the stuff of high art, but a feature of all human vitality—even the commonest among us has an idea of art, because art in its various forms is always a human expression. The poet’s stance, wisely, is not defensive, but honest. These poems show the work of an exemplary craftsman who brings to his craft delight in discovery and plenty of affection, which are so needed in our present moment. This is an elegant and moving collection, one I will go back to again and again.

—Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter

Edison Jennings’ poems are full of life. His poetry is vigorous, sonically delightful, and brims with felt experience.

—Ernest F Suarez, Executive Director, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

Edison Jennings lives in the southwestern corner of Virginia and works as a Head Start bus driver. He served thirteen years active duty in the U.S. Navy. After separation from the Navy, he completed his education and began teaching and writing. His poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies. He is the author of three chapbooks, Reckoning, Small Measures, and A Letter to Greta.