J. W. Marshallis co-owner of Open Books, a poetry bookstore in Seattle, Washington. This is his first full-length collection.

Books by J. W. Marshall: Meaning a Cloud

Other poems on the web by J. W. Marshall:
"Love Poem"

About Meaning a Cloud:

"In J. W. Marshall's deceptively neighborly company we find ourselves, again and again, privileged to moments of essential vision, where the world has been pared to its peculiar fundamentals: 'Some things are easy to say / and others take / teeth.' Watchful, ruefully comic, alight with playful lyric precision and a plainspoken rhetorical elegance, Meaning a Cloud is not only a record of one body's recovery from injury but a rendering of the mind's companion journey: pained, stubbornly amused, at last arriving at a state of visionary completion. It is a sorrowing, hopeful book, all of a crucial, embracing piece."
—Susan Hutton

"John Marshall's poems are without sentimentality, without excess, and without guile. They envelop us in a plainspoken chaos, singing a quiet and terrifying lullaby that records the world as it becomes defamiliarized through loss. These are the poems of an avid and spooked watcher who pays radical attention to 'all that else' made strange through violent accident, institutional care, materialism, aging, love, and death. Marshall writes about the fragility of the body, the disordering of the mind. These traumas are described in language that rearranges the broken world, bypassing all cliché and pity. Throughout the collection, bitterness is held at bay by love in a speaker who resorts to a deranged syntax and music to re-invent, and re-call, 'the voice in the whirlwind.'"
—Catherine Barnett