My Not-My Soldier - Paperback

by Jennifer MacKenzie (Author)

Winner of the 2014 Fence Modern Poets Series.

Jennifer Mackenzie's debut is an unfettered travelogue of embodied intellect and flights of gorgeous observance.

Go hang yourself
in the light undestroyed

tourist in the tremor of
a dirty window this is the famous

border we're coming up on hidden from
ourselves like the hunter whose sudden

antlers implied the death of self
in love No you shut up

) (

That all good poetry is the poetry of exile]

is bullshit, I belong to my body & try
desperately & stubbornly to unknow it

The Individual distilled into
Outspoken by Fergie

Author Biography

Jennifer MacKenzie grew up in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and was educated at Wesleyan University's College of Letters and the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. Until October 2012, she edited the Damascus-based magazine Syria Today, and her articles and literary non-fiction on Syria, Turkey and other countries in the Near East have appeared in The Huffington Post, Guernica, The Kenyon Review Online, and Killing the Buddha. She now lives in the Bronx where she teaches literature, composition and journalism at Lehman College.