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"Every drawer in every chest overflows with illogic and passion."
"Do we want love / each and every day of our lives?" Jan Conn asks in a poem called "Michoacán." "You bet your ass," she answers. The poems of Botero's Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist canvases, astonishingly kinetic narratives composed by looking hard at unusual pictures, the artists' writings and their circumstances—and letting them speak for themselves. The book becomes a journey away from the familiar into other cultures, especially Latin American. Poem after poem gathers a sense of inner as well as outward journey away from a "perilous childhood" into a wide world rich and strange with a recurrent underworld motif of darkness, blackness. But what a black! Rich and various, life as if viewed in the "obsidian mirrors the Aztecs fashioned from the dark."
"Colours the Aztecs invented:
eagle-devouring-snake black
expansionist black
black of the flowery wars
dried-blood black.
They loved the night creatures: owls, scorpions,
bats, the Queen of Spiders."
—from "People of the Left-Sided Hummingbird"
"Botero's Beautiful Horses is the latest in Jan Conn's unique body of poetic writing that blends science, history, image and dream into what she calls the Ôstrange embrace' of the surreal, the concrete, the visual, and the intellectual. Conn's verse here is terse and aphoristic as often as it is lush, evocative, and ornamental."—Owen Percy
"As a poet and a biologist she merges art and science...Her work is embedded with contrasts and contradictions...full of starlight, fire and blood"—Janet Grafton
"Jan Conn is a Dalí with a scalpel of words, with colourwheels for eyes. To read her is to feel alive, sometimes flayed, but always held in a lush dream replete with flora and fauna every bit as magical as they are real. She is conducting an operation of intelligence and observation, a taxonomy of the senses cooked over flames of Art, embracing the cultures of the Americas."—Marilyn Bowering
, Canadian LiteratureJan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and works as a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on mosquitoes, their evolution and ecology. She has published seven previous books of poetry.