Janée knows how to snap a moment into focus, without condescending, on behalf of her readers.  Her interest in what happens when a poet lets the world speak for itself inhabits large swaths here; each page benefits from it.  These felt to me like steady poems in a moving world, or like reliably still reports from travel’s manic introspection.  I was enchanted reading Coördinates of Yes.  It’s honest and intimate without ever becoming precious, and it gives us the self without the usual indulgence.  There’s an unusual, and refreshing, sincerity in these poems, from a poet who has stripped herself of cynicism.

         – David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars and The Other

Though they traverse European landscape, these dense, rich poems are voyages as Baudelaire inscribed the term: journeys to the interior.  Baugher conducts us through a paradis artificiel where art is the window to journeys within.  A stunning début collection.

         – Peter Cooley, author of The Van Gogh Notebook and Divine Margins

If, as Wallace Stevens said, “the greatest poverty  is not to live in the physical world,” Janée Baugher is, indeed, a rich woman. Whether she is regarding a work of art or a landscape seen in “the altered state [of] travel,” Baugher is keenly observant, almost “walking on eyes,” while simultaneously aware that “It is only with one’s heart that one can see.” Coördinates of Yes is an impressive début collection.

         – Grace Bauer, author of Beholding Eye and Retreats & Recognitions

May you have the great fortune to read Coördinates of Yes on an eastbound transatlantic flight as I’ve just done.  This book is an exquisite poetic guide through cemeteries and village spires, 2 a.m. city streets, sunflower fields, derelict hotels, young loves, sea cliffs, and work after work of articulate art, an old world made new by Baugher’s insightful gaze, deftness of phrasing, and companionable spirit.

         – Jonathan Johnson, author of Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves

In reading Coördinates of Yes, one encounters an alchemy of images, surprising textures, and an alluring contemplative spirit that announces Baugher’s joy simply in making language sing beyond mere observation and description.  Through her travels, both imagined and real, one realizes an evolving, stark cosmopolitanism in Janée’s language inventions.  I am thrilled by her elegant utterances and animated insights in poem after poem.

         – Major Jackson, author of Hoops and Leaving Saturn

The Swiss painter Paul Klee famously said in his notebooks, “One eye sees, the other feels.” These lapidary ekphrastic renderings by Janée Baugher take Klee to heart.  Braiding sensory pleasures with meticulous observation, she fully succeeds in transporting us to places previously un-sensed and unseen.  Here is a garden of depths and delights.

         – Jeffrey Levine, Publisher, Tupelo Press, and author of Rumor of Cortez and Mortal, Everlasting