Life-affirming but without illusions, How to Live on Bread and Music showcases poet Jennifer K. Sweeney’s mature consciousness and circumspect intelligence. This collection takes us on a physical and spiritual trip, symbolized in recurring images of the train. Exploring broad themes such as identity formation, nostalgia, and impermanence, the poet passes through risk to find refuge in the sensory world. What is most remarkable is Sweeney’s ability to confide without burdening, her talent for arranging enough silence between words for us to locate the pulse of meaning.
There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician
who plays a harp without strings.
The city has one chair
where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
A lone streetlamp tends
a blue arc of light.
A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.
The world filters through
his empty frame as he plucks the air.
Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don’t.
That is the choice we are always making.
Here’s Emily Gwinn reading aloud Jennifer K. Sweeney’s poem “Weathering” from How to Live on Bread and Music for NPR Public Radio station Spokane Public Radio’s “Poetry Moment” on September 6, 2018.
Winner of the 2009 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets
Selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses