Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems by Jan Conn - Encounters (Brick Books) - Brick Books Poetry Map (sitios de interés)

Jan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and is a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on the genetics and ecology of mosquitoes. She has published seven previous books of poetry, most recently Botero's Beautiful Horses (2009). Whisk, with Yoko's Dogs, is forthcoming 2013 from Pedlar Press.

She is a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, Division of Infectious Diseases, New York State Department of Health in Albany NY, and Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the School of Public Health, SUNY-Albany.

She has a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Toronto. She has lived in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, Caracas (Venezuela), Gainesville (Florida), and Burlington (Vermont).

Preface by Sir Peter Crane, Director of the Royal Botanic (Kew) Gardens, London, England

"... a book of marvels from the tropical zone of poetry." - Roo Borson

Jaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography.

Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered new world of extraordinary richness, which is also an old world still governed by myth, and the ecological interdependence of everything: plant, animal, human, god; the living and the dead.

Sources for this collection include Mee's journals, sketchbooks, and paintings. Jan Conn is a scientist by education and occupation, but biologist meets poet in the deep dive into the soul of the rainforest.

She creates the Amazonian world from inside, from her own ardent research travels there, as well as through the sharp eyes of Margaret Mee.

Cover art: Cattleya violacea, 1981. Margaret Mee. Rio Cuini, Amazonas state, Brazil. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Jan Conn reads Encounters from Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems on Audioboo

Jan Conn - Jaguar Rain - review (Journal of Canadian Poetry)

Conn, Kearley’s poems vibrant with verbs (Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Sunday, October 8, 2006)

A Review by Travis Mason (The Goose, 2006)

Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems by Jan Conn (www.poetryreviews.ca)

Jan Conn, Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems (The Malahat Review 157, Winter 2006)

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