Jennifer Franklin concentrated in English and Creative Writing at Brown University (AB cum laude, 1994). She attended Columbia University School of the Arts as a Harvey Baker Fellow (MFA, 1996). Poems from Looming debuted in the Paris Review's "Ten New Poets" issue in 1996. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines and journals such as Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Pequod, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, New England Review, The Nation, Salmagundi, Boston Review,, and Guernica. Her work has been translated into Romanian and Portuguese. A selection of her poetry is featured in Andrew Solomon's award-winning book, Far From the Tree. Her chapbook, Persephone's Ransom (Finishing Line Press), was published in September 2011. Franklin is co-editor of Slapering Hol Press, the small press imprint of The Hudson Valley Writers' Center. She teaches poetry workshops at The Hudson Valley Writers' Center and lives in New York City.

Books by Jennifer Franklin:

Other poems on the web by Jennifer Franklin:
Three poems
Two poems
"I would like my love to die"
"My Daughter’s Body"
"Messenger"

Jennifer Franklin's Website.

About Looming:

"Jennifer Franklin has taken the true path to her terrible story, one of the most wrenching in all our human circumstance. She has found--of course I mean by that verb a translation of the classical meaning: she has "invented" the one classical myth that can serve her meaning in its ultimate truths. Nothing in the occasion has been missed, but all is wonderfully changed, and Franklin has joined Tennyson on the other side of pain, it is ecstasy."
—Richard Howard

"The poems in Jennifer Franklin's stunning Looming strive to alleviate personal tragedy through identification with the ancient and mythic, most particularly with the archetypal figure of maternal sorrow, Demeter. But if Demeter was allowed to reunite with her daughter for a portion of the year, the terms of Franklin's plight remain fixed and unchanging. 'A sad, solitary child--things always hurt me more / Than everyone else,' she writes. 'It was all practice for this / Permanent pain.' All the familiar responses to traumatic loss--self-critique, anger, guilt, deep despair and the vacillation between destructiveness and an almost improbable will to live--convene here in poems at once unrelentingly agonized yet elegantly, beautifully, imaginatively phrased. All poets know that it is through the work of the imagination that the world can be made bearable, even lovable again. But seldom is that knowledge put to use with such urgency and grace as it is in these poems."
—Timothy Donnelly

"Jennifer Franklin's poems speak to all that is lost, broken, and aching with wound. Although the poems in this superb series are intensely personal, they borrow from and gather the momentum of mythology in their raw, honest depiction of a mother's hard grief and her almost unbearable tenderness--the other side of brokenness."
—Emily Fragos