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Jessica Laser’s debut full-length collection of poetry
There’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which two people fall in love at a dinner party while the rest of the company makes small talk about the military general Sergei Kuzmich, who only appears in this scene. Kuzmich had repeatedly broken down in tears of joy in front of the state council, trying to read aloud a commendatory letter from the sovereign that began, “Sergei Kuzmich! From all sides rumors reach me…” Those not involved in falling in love at the party laugh, appearing involved in this gossip, but, as Tolstoy describes it, “no matter how indifferent or inattentive to them they seemed, the feeling for some reason was…that the anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich, and the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and all the power of attention of the entire company was directed only at this couple.”
Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides takes a poem to be a kind of pretense, an “anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich,” the thing we say when we can’t talk about being in love. And we can never talk about being in love, because, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says, “it is not the kind of thing that can be known (it isn’t information).” These poems aim to reach beyond information—to speak from where Sergei Kuzmich leaves off—in order to give voice to the kinds of experience that, to become knowable, require the pretense of art.
— Margaret Ross, author of A Timeshare
"“I found in myself the lyric I looked for.” From all sides, Sergei Kuzmich radiates epistemological gossip—like Knowledge playing a game of telephone with Experience, Jessica Laser’s debut makes cool blue thought sound like rumor sound like scripture sound like wit sound like song, but nothing else in contemporary American poetry sounds remotely like it. Ultimately, the book is a record of giving oneself over to art, and it is rendered here in perfect pitch. “I had gone upstairs to confront the music.” Only Laser could turn a bad Brooklyn party into smoldering prophecy. Her voice is its own place, and can make a heaven of the hell that is our present. Against doom, it’s here to stay: “Speak now or forever.”"
— Daniel Poppick, author of The Police