Works by
Charles Jensen
(Poet)

Poetry

• The First Risk (2009)
  In four extended sequences, The First Risk confronts the murder of Matthew Shepard and the myth of Venus and Adonis through the eyes of Italian Renaissance painter Luca Cambiaso; the eccentric women of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother and the search for authenticity; the nature of love and obsession in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the pain and confusion of loss; and the compelling story of a physicist in search of his lost wife, haunted by a phantom voice that may or may not be hers...

• The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (2007) -- Finalist DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook award
  This beautiful, haunting text describes Maribel Dixon's crossing over to the Ghost-World and Edward's attempts to reach her there, to bring her back or go himself via found documents, interviews, prose fragments, and reassembled poems.

• Living Things (2006) -- Winner 2006 Frank O'Hara Award Chapbook Competition
  Contact Charles Jensen at chasjens @ yahoo . com for purchasing information.
  "In this marvelous collection, Charles Jensen gracefully ranges from grief to redemption in tightly constructed elegies. A lesser poet would have abandoned prosody for emotion, would have ignored creativity for therapy, but Jensen's talent is large, encompassing, and smart. Like too few other poets on today's scene, he understands the elegy as genre and the capacity for poetry of all sorts to show, to guide, to confirm. I'm grateful for these personal glimpses into a death and a life, which are as unflinching as they are brave." — Jim Elledge

• Little Burning Edens (2005)
  Contact Charles Jensen at chasjens @ yahoo . com for purchasing information.