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 Born in Illinois, Jane left the USA after doing graduate work in linguistics and an undergraduate degree in literature / creative writing (poetry specialization) at the University of Illinois and Columbia College, respectively. She currently resides in central Japan where she works as an associate professor at a national school of education.
Jane has published well over a hundred poems in the international small presses and dozens of essays and interviews. Recent work has appeared in New American Writing, 580 Split, Bateau, Tinfish, CaKe, One Less, FourW, and elsewhere.
She is currently writing a fourth book of poems.
Bibliography |
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Exhibit C (Ahadada, 2008)
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Aquiline (Printed Matter, 2007)
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Skin Museum (Avant Books, 2006) |
What others say
Without the least strain, Jane Joritz Nakagawa takes readers on a carnivalesque tour of American culture in language that splices together the strange heights and depths of the terrain. Her ear is tuned to what makes the language live and there's eye candy too: lithe cuts and jumps that make each line worthy of notice. Exhibit C is a rare pleasure.
—Maxine Chernoff
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s poems partake readily in the pleasures of freshly arranged particles and atoms of language. Frequenting a realm of happy appropriation, she daringly reorders and disrupts conventional poetic expectations - and she often conducts this pretty quickly. Readers, be alert.
—Pam Brown
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s new collection, Exhibit C, is startling in its complex simplicity and innovative dazzle. To give a brief example, one of a series of poems that examines American “folk/lore (failure)” and (or) nature, “Evil Nature 5,” opens with a dadaesque image, moving deftly past the absurd to the trenchant: “The head finally wad(dl)es through/ / As if written by / / “bird on a wing”// . . . (as the scene dissolves into chaos) i // brandish my tear”! I love the chasms, the flights, the seriousness with which the poem closes― and I love this bold, smart poetry!
—Cynthia Hogue
There are few poets who can render emotion with such ferocity and intelligence.
—Paul Hoover
Her work . . . constantly challenges our expectations. Real acts of violence are enacted in violent distortions of language . . . . In a threatening landscape, a diseased ecosphere, very little can be relied on, not even the grand narratives of gender theory, which she explores so perceptively . . .
—Frances Presley
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet who works, or one should say plays, with (and among) multiple literary and non-literary sources. . . she makes hay with the English language any way she can, and for the many experimental impulses she follows, the results . . . throw interesting light on the relation between poet and language, between (non) comprehensibility and (non) context, between word and flesh.
There's a fallenness embedded in the life and experience of flesh that she will not shy away from, and which indeed she makes--despite deflections and reflections of all kinds-- into her main subject: The body betrays, is forever a wound, wounding . . . .
But hers are takes on much more than the fallen world in all its inglorious Faustian bargains . . . . Joritz-Nakagawa won't be seduced by anything less than her own resistances to language . . . .The distances traversed, and treasured, between "Her stunned immobile/ Body" and "my stunned immobile body" suggest elusive dramas that move in and out of focus, in and out of view. The unsaid, the unread, the as it were undead all converge in cinematic/real-time actions and axioms . . . . In sum, these are poems swollen with physicality, half-felt presences, and an intelligence that leaves nothing off its radar. "Who is speaking for us, among the/ colonized clouds..." she asks . . . . Perhaps we can ask instead-- who is speaking for us in (as she writes) "our wounded beauty"? The short answer is, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa does.
—Alan Botsford (editor, Poetry Kanto)
. . . She styles language into poems that force us to reconsider our preconceptions and that address many of our most immediate concerns. . . . While her subjects may remain serious, Joritz-Nakagawa . . . takes delight in language, and reveals a sense of playfulness in her various experiments . . . for those who are interested in expanding the limits of language, Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet worth reading. At turns stunning and shocking . . .
—Suzanne Kamata (editor, Yomimono)
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s poems . . are extremely intelligent, emotional and provocative and challenge the reader to go back to them again and again.
—Hillel Wright (book reviewer, Metropolis)
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