"[A] powerful work ... infused with pale light and pearly pain even as it pulses with chiming word repetitions and syncopated rhythms. Lithe and spare, Mead's poems move across the secretive white of the page like cat tracks on snow."
Booklist "The mutable realm inhabited by this second collection of poems shifts seamlessly between loss and redemption, despair and ... Read moreexaltation... Mead is "making flypaper out of history./ Personal and cultural," collecting and recollecting particles of a shattered past that coalesce, ultimately, into a testimonial to her passion for life and to the power of historicity... Her poems evolve from a confessional nucleus devoid of self-pity, conducted by supple lexicon, and 'when you listen to the words / you know they want life / just like we did, only harder."
Ellie Sarasohn, Boston Review "In [Mead's] breathtaking second collection... [she] has distilled narrative to a startling purity. An extraordinary tactile silence abound in Mead's taut, uncompromising emotional landscape, which ranges through grief, anger, complicity, petition, cowardice, grace... The smallest, most fragile events are taken in by Mead, delicately, unrelentingly, and are weighted with purpose, seen deeply, imbued with the capacity to speak with composure to the ineffable and the horrific, equally."
Lia Purpura, The Antioch Review ADVANCE PRAISE "In Jane Mead's second book, House of Poured-Out Waters, she lifts from ground-zero to reclaim the self by reclaiming a world that can make words work. Sometimes violent, sometimes luminous, these poems form a stunning language that marvelously empowers her concerns and lifts her into a higher realm of lifeworks."
Philip Booth Praise for Jane Mead's earlier work: "Mead combines flinty honesty with an organic intellect... She employs taut, colloquial language and firmly places her personal history against a searching, almost existential understanding of the world-even at its most difficult." - Publishers Weekly "Crossed and recrossed with a plain speech that is haunting in its directness ... these fully realized poems remind us of Robert Lowell's darker half." - Booklist "Mead's language is so freshly constructed, so nervy, that she is able to transform topics that may seem merely sensational in the hands of a lesser poet-for example, drug addiction-into art... Jane Mead proves herself to be an exceedingly lucent and thought-provoking poet." - Dorothy Barresi, Gettysburg Review Show Less