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Allusive, mystical, and deeply felt, J.L. Conrad's A World in Which calls to mind Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Her lyricism is impeccable, her imagination radical. Open houses, carpool lines, married life, pet care, and election days barely conceal the dystopian of scarab infestations, environmental illness, mass surveillance, biblical floods, and meteor showers. Granted communion with their beloved dead, the living persevere despite the "approaching hoofbeats" of the Apocalypse. As these visionary poems avow, "It falls to us to shovel dirt over the flames."
-Carolyn Hembree, For Today
About the author
J. L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collection A Cartography of Birds (Louisiana State University Press), and the chapbooks Recovery, winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize (Texas Review Press), Not If But When, winner of the third annual Dead Lake Chapbook Competition (Salt Hill), and Species of Light, a limited-edition artist's book carried out in collaboration with printmaker Sarah Noble. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Jellyfish, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from American University and PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Ohio, she currently lives in Madison.
