Description
Poet Jane Ormerod follows up her critically-acclaimed collection “Recreational Vehicles on Fire” (Three Rooms Press, 2009) with the powerful and visionary work, “Welcome to the Museum of Cattle,” in which her unique style firmly establishes her as a master of a unique visual/language poetry stream. Ormerod, a former visual artist, writes poetry that thrusts images into thought, juxtaposing the familiar with the peculiar, imposing emotion on a plastic world. Her poems offer startling new observations of the world, filled with both humor and deep insight. Reading Jane Ormerod is like experiencing your favorite music in a way you’ve never heard it before.
“Beyond the coast-to-coast culture of pay-as-you-go, Welcome to the Museum of Cattle exhibits an insistent voice; a palette of paradox and poetry – spoken, broken, blunt.” —Richard Kirwan (artist, London).
“These poems explode off the page; translate language into ecstasy, energy and intimacy. They purr, growl, bite. Confess, question, rant and whisper. These keen, bright, big-hearted poems bounce bravely, fluidly on linguistic trampolines. They fly so high—become one with sun, moon and stars.” —Rich Ferguson (L.A. poet/spoken word artist)
Welcome to the Museum of Cattle: Poems, by Jane Ormerod, Three Rooms Press
ISBN: 978-0-9835813-9-0, $15.00, 6” x 9”, 76 Pages, October 2012, Trade Paper, Poetry
High Praise for Welcome to the Museum of Cattle:
“Four decades after the Beatles landed in America came another British Invasion; to wit, the arrival of Jane Ormerod on the New York poetry scene in 2004, an event which was no less swoon-and-gasp-worthy. Suffice it to say, we Yankees are mighty glad she crossed the pond. So, Welcome to the Museum of Cattle, indeed. Welcome to a bawdy barnyard of a book that renders Orwell’s Animal Farm as tame as a petting zoo. Wherein our heroine, in the guise of a Cockney cowgirl, throws out enough red meat to raise cholesterol levels, while simultaneously raising the literary bar. Seemingly spawned from the loop-and-surprise prose of John Ashbery, with a bit of Gertrude Stein’s playful rhythm, Jane Ormerod adds her own fierce and urgent glossolalia. You will find no swaying grass or gentle heifers lowing here; despite the title, this is poetry drawn from the fist of the city, in all its swagger and grit and grandeur. Naysayers of experimental poetry be damned-Ormerod delightfully assaults our senses with language turned on its ear, and the result is a stunning salvo of sonics. Yet, for all her oblique bent and disparate juxtapositions, Ormerod sets a tone which creates a connective chain of lucid thought and meaning. Methinks that Shakespeare would say there’s a “method to her badness.” He would also, as a fellow Brit, proclaim her simply brill.”
—Cin Hochman, First Literary Review East
http://www.rulrul.4mg.com/index_34.html
“Jane Ormerod’s new book from Three Rooms Press Welcome to the Museum of Cattle is an effervescent syphon of words, bubbling over with sound collisions, found phrases, imagist fragments, and urgent unanswerable questions. Anyone with a weakness for words and a fondness for seeing them knock into each other, releasing unexpected associations and emotions, would relish this museum. Its exhibits may not strike the visitor as orderly or predictable, but they regularly feature a truly disarming level of energy. The verses spread across the page like an uncontrollable spill, like fireworks with a mind of their own, like a stream of flood-water taking new territory, like a new science just being uncovered.”
—William Seaton
About Jane Ormerod
Born on the south coast of England, Jane Ormerod now lives in New York City and performs extensively across the United States and beyond—Los Angeles to Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Canada, Britain, Ireland, and The Netherlands to name just a few places. In 2011 Jane performed at the John Cage retrospective at The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, England. Other performance venues include Beyond Baroque, The Knitting Factory, Bowery Poetry Club, The Inspired Word, Le Poisson Rouge, The Cornelia Street Cafe, Seligmann Center for the Arts, Galapagos Art Space, and The Stone. She is a founding editor at great weather for MEDIA which focuses on edgy and experimental poetry, prose, and live performance.
