Guernica Editions

Jennifer Zilm's second poetry collection, The Missing Field, concerns themes of translation, preservation and the engagement with the transitory documents of everyday life--whether a snapshot of a Vancouver bus, postcards from the Middle East, lecture notes on Euripides, a van Gogh museum catalogue or marginalia in a water-damaged collection of Rilke poems. The missing field is an imaginative space where all the documents lost to time can be re-imagined.

Hey you!--this postcard, like every other, is just fragment / of a larger journey. Stepping over the threshold / of the plane, I entered this hot room / of a country. Seen entire the desert seems soft / but the sand is sharp to touch, like turning / hard snow with bare hands when I was a small girl. -- From "Postcard: a desert sestina"