Running with the Hare

Jemma Leigh Roe is a poet and visual artist. Her debut chapbook, Running with the Hare, won the 2024 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. She holds a PhD from Princeton University.

In Running with the Hare, Jemma Leigh Roe’s luminous poems are riverful mouths “overflowing / like a riot, a prayer, a shudder.” I’m struck by her masterful command of form in the condensed space of the chapbook as reflective of the book’s concerns with identity, desire, belonging, and memory. How does one occupy the past in the present? Between strict form and formlessness, we are reminded that every world contains beauty and destruction. And yet, we go on—in the breakage of the line, in the breakage of language and the bodies it once held. These poems are revelatory, describing the intimacies of transformation and “the birds that sing through” whatever self that might be lost while being found. Roe makes concrete “all that remain[s]” of the histories that converge within the selves in these poems. What a pleasure and a privilege to behold.

––Chelsea Dingman, Author of Thaw, Though a Small Ghost, and I, Divided