Glass Float
Brick Books
Spring 2020
“Jane Munro’s Glass Float—part travelogue, part journal, part meditation—picks up where Blue Sonoma ends: the speaker finds herself alone, at the live edge of her life. These neat, clear poems contain Munro’s breath. They cross oceans.”
—Ian Williams, author of Reproduction (Giller Prize winner 2019)
Glass Float, the seventh collection by award-winning poet Jane Munro, considers the widening of horizons that border and shape our lives, the familiarity and mystery of conscious experience, and the deepening awareness that comes with a dedicated practice such as yoga.
The poems are attuned to the breath that shapes body; they are equally alert to the world. They find our precarious time set within a larger time and connected to humanity’s long past. In their gathered particulars they bring us close to the concavities, the complex familiarity and mystery of conscious experience.
A reader’s guide for Glass Float
Reviews of Glass Float
Featured in FreeFall Review
What contracts and what expands in grief and where does one go when there is no escape from the self?
…. Glass Float is an ocean of insight bombs.
Micheline Maylor on Glass Float
Munro is back with Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). Her tools are new: narrative and diaristic series interspersed with flashes from the biographical past. But Munro has the same ambition to summon meaning from the jumble of experience.
Review of Glass Float by Kim Fahner in periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics (rob mclennan)
Jane Munro’s Glass Float is a book that almost seems to float easily and beautifully in either air or water, taking readers on a voyage around the world, but also on a journey that leads us more deeply within ourselves as we read through the poems. She sets the tone with her epigraph, using a quotation from David J. Chalmers, who has written: “Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.”
Review of Glass Float by David Starkey, California Review of Books
Glass Float, Jane Munro (Brick) “Art is suggestion,” the poet remembers being told by her grandfather, “art is not representation.” That distinction holds true throughout Glass Float, and yet Munro is fiendishly good at describing things, in particular a yoga retreat in India not long after the death of her husband. The book ranges from prose poem sequences to the cryptic and beautiful lyrics for which she is best known. Always, though, Munro’s poems enact the advice of one of her yoga teachers: “Shine like a full moon without dispelling the dark.”