Reamy Jansen
Reamy Jansen is Professor of English and Humanities at Rockland Community College (SUNY). His work--essays, poems, interviews with poets--has appeared in a wide range of national literary magazines, such as Evansville Review, Gargoyle, LIT, The Bloomsbury Review, The Higginsville Reader, among others. He has received ten Pushcart Prize nominations.
He has held residencies at Yaddo, Gell House--Books and Writers, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (two Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowships), NY Mills Creative Arts (the Jerome Foundation), and The Oberfelzer Kunstlerhaus in Germany.
He is the recipient of two State University of New York Chancellor's Awards--one for teaching, another for creativity and scholarshp.
He is a long-time Contributing Editor to the Bloomsbury Review of Books and three years ago initiated the magazine's successful short prose series, "The Out of Bounds Essay" www.bloomsburyreview.org
He is also nonfiction editor of online tri-quarterly The Hamilton Stone Review http://hamiltonstone.org
He was two-term Vice President for the National Book Critics Cicle (NBCC) www.bookcritics.org His reviews have been published in The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlants Journal Constitution, Ottawa Sentinel, and American Book Review, among others.
He was a founding member of Radical Teacher and its co-editor with Susan O'Malley for 13 years. He remains an active editor and blogger.
His books are:
Available Light, Recollections and Reflections of a Father (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2010).
My Drive, A Natural History (Finishing Line Press, 2004).
Breaking the Alabaster Jar, Conversations with Li-Young Lee (ed. Earl Ingersoll), "Art and the Deeper Silence." (Boa Editions, 2006).
Reviews of Available Light:
"When SUNY Rockland and Fordham professor Reamy Jansen was young, he made a box to store family photos, adding a sprinkling of red and blue glitter over 'images that had already started to curl and roll up like rhododendron leaves in winter.' This graceful suite of personal essays about fathers and sons should prove a more durable keepsake, with breathtaking phrases that glint and surprise." Chronogram, Hudson Valley Arts and Literature
"I finished the memoir in one sitting. I found it to be not only like poetry, but poetry itself. The language, the silences and the formal structures are all very beautiful. It seems to me to have a place across the borders of various genres, which I always love. I felt the reality of both your parents in the descriptions, both explicit and elliptical."
Jane Lazarre, Some Place Quite Unknown, a novel; The Mother Knot, On Loving Men.
"Let me begin by recommending Reamy Jansen's Available Light, Recollections and Reflections of a Son. There are a lot of wonderful details of material culture of the nineteen fifties and early sixties here, and a memorable house that is at the center of the family's lives.
The story is full of incident and suffering. But what is most striking about the book is that it manages to treat with delicacy material that would be, in another writer's hands, potentially melodramatic: an alchoholic mother, a distant father,the death of both of them,a threat to eyesight to the narrator.
I don't mean that Jansen makes light of what is serious, but rather that he handles his stories in the way we are told to handle tender dough--gently, quickly, expertly: with a light touch.
Jansen manages, for example, the present his mother's frantic, anti-Semitism in a perfect mix of light and dark, shocking and familiar, near and far, painfully sharp and almost lilting.
How does he do that? I think there is an element of grace here--both grace in its particular Christian usage of freely given and also in our everyday use of the word to mean a kind of effortless charm and beauty. Jansen's language is graceful, and he offer forgiveness to the deeply flawed people in his past.
Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers.
Forthcoming volumes:
Circuit, Poems
Kezboard, A Traveller's Tales of Germany.
Reamy Jansen can be reached on Facebook.
