Only So Much

This is a book of memory from childhood beyond middle age, and though the poems are experiences sparked by remembered scenes and interactions, they also explore how memory works and comes to us, the discoveries through them of who the speaker has become. This is a biography of characters who embody actions and consequences of the speaker to reveal the darker sides of what she has lived, to consider if there is redemption for the worst and best in her. The poems move in non-linear time with cultural and political contexts to weave with the characters' impulses, behaviors, and beliefs as they revolve around her mother's suicide, her indulgences in escape from duty and urban discomforts, with a focus on the "edginess" of events and interactions. The adventures of rearing up against difficulties, and of indiscretions, teach her the practice of survival and the victories of perception and renewal.

Jan Wesley's superb new collection of poems, Only So Much, reminds us that every book of memory is first a book of loss. With extraordinary candor-and a raw tenderness-these poems chart the emotional valences of an individual life at odds with both those false expectations and the urgent hopes of a passage from adolescence to mature adulthood. Always, memory inscribed by loss struggles with the desire for a pure present. The title of this luminous book measures how much we're able to give to the loved ones in our lives as well as how much, from this wounding world itself, we can take. -David St. John

Entering into Only So Much is not unlike stepping into an iconic American river in which we are "borne back ceaselessly into the past." In this gorgeous book, Jan Wesley quests and questions, following currents upstream in a long line that carries her as water does. Her subjects are memory, the body, loss, childhood, aging, and the slow movement toward reconciliation. These poems are nets that memory weaves on water. They glisten. And you cannot turn your eyes away.-Marsha de la O

Starting with the beautiful opening phrase "the light handles me like water" to the "sultry wives smok[ing] thin cigars" to "the drawn-out years of thirst and grief", we know we're in the deft hands of a virtuoso poet and thinker. With these poems, Wesley earns her right to enchant and caution us that "it is habit to send the canary in first". It is on these wings that Only So Much soars. Don't get left behind.-Lynne Thompson, City of Los Angeles Poet Laureate