A book launch for Caroline Jennings' work of Poetry "Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything In Between)! Our evening will feature an opening reading by Floyd Collins.
Praise for "Stop and Smell the Fractals":
Caroline Jennings’ Stop and Smell the Fractals (And Everything In Between) is a striking chapbook. Jennings’ poetry innovatively explores everyday life through the lens of one of our world’s strongest foundations: mathematics. From equations to odes, poems approach complex moments with calculated candor. In “Life as a Function Where x=Time,” the poet tracks a young nephew’s life along the X-axis. In “Asymptote, a spine mimics a graphed line, blending the body with geometry. Stained glass windows appear as personified “octagonal geometry” in a cathedral. People’s “laughter blends into one uniform wave function.” This chapbook embarks on a gorgeous quest for the world’s patterns and solutions while acknowledging the forces that complicate them. Caroline Jennings is a poet with a mathematician’s eye and a generous artist’s heart. Stop and Smell the Factals (And Everything In Between) is an important chapbook to read.
–Elizabeth Muscari
Tormenting geese, a stolen parking spot, stain glass from a cathedral’s windows, the lack of precision in a nautilus shell, poor posture: in this chapbook, Caroline Jennings delivers a disarmingly earnest and often humorous study of a mind obsessed with the perfection proposed by mathematical equations. By the end, we learn her way of tolerating and trusting the insights of all that refuses to add up. As Jennings so movingly puts it in one these marveling poems, “but I search anyway.”
–Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away
About Caroline:
Caroline Jennings is the author of Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything in Between). Her poems have appeared in The Diamond Line, Tupelo Quarterly, Black Moon Magazine, and elsewhere. A native of Arkansas, she completed a Bachelor of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the University of Arkansas, both of which influenced this collection. She currently works as a regulatory affairs consultant in the medical space but makes time to write any chance she gets.
About Floyd:
Floyd Collins earned his M.F.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Arkansas. He has published two book-length critical studies, Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity (Delaware UP 2003) and The Living Artifact (Stephen F. Austin State UP 2021). His latest volume of poetry is titled My Back Pages: The Teresa Poems (Stephen F. Austin State UP 2022) and is available for pre-orders on Amazon. His poetry and critical prose appear regularly in The Arkansas Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Sewanee Review. He was awarded The Allen Tate Poetry Prize in 2007.