To be released June 30, 2023

Spoons, Knives, Checkbooks is a collection of verse that explores what it means to merge two lives while still maintaining one’s own identity.The poems in the collection take a journey through early married life and its struggles, including infertility and house remodeling. By the end, the speaker finds solace in the comforts of routine and connection with others.

Jennifer Judge has taught creative writing at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA, for more than twenty years. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Under the Gum Tree, The Fictional Cafe, Literary Mama, and Blueline, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and in 2018, one of her poems was selected for permanent inclusion in Jenny Holzer’s For Philadelphia, 2018 in the Comcast Technology Center.She earned her MFA from Goddard College and currently lives in Dallas, PA, with her husband and two daughters.Visit jenniferjudgepoet.com for more information.

6" x 9", 75 pages. Printed on archival quality paper .

PRAISE FOR SPOONS, KNIVES, CHECKBOOKS:

“Jennifer Judge’s poems are written with a quotidian beauty. This salient debut collection, filled with memorable images and details, unflinchingly looks at how our future is always built on the past. The small, quiet moments of Judge’s poems—being the first awake, highways at night, laundry on the line—are charged with grace and significance, revealing the connections of, and our connections to, love, place, and home.” —Kenny Fries, award winning author of In the Province of the Gods and In the Gardens of Japan

“In these brave reflections on everyday life, Jennifer Judge turns the trivial sublime and paints personal pain in vivid colors. Daring, honest, and eloquent.” —William Irwin author of Both/And and Always Dao

“As explosive as they are quiet, as bold as they are subtle, Judge's poems serve as models for the deep, unflinching focus that fearless lyric-narrative poetry calls for. Her vigorous language initiates the reader into the aura of embodied experience, tracing what-might-have-been and what-may-be with the same exacting precision as what-is and what-has-been. These poems are intensely personal and emotionally courageous. We can taste the "clothespins damp with spit," brush fingers along "the carpet / with a seam down its middle / like a scar after an appendectomy," overhear every uneasy exchange of "crude politeness" that governs the poet's days, and we are better for it.” —Robert Fillman, author of House Bird