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So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter

Source: GBF
Paperback, 80 pgs.
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So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter, which won the DC Poet Project award in 2021, explores the broken pieces we become to find the whole. Through persona poems, particularly those with the “messy girl” and “candy girl,” Koiter explores what it means to be broken and keep going. The title itself speaks to the overwhelm that many of us have felt at one time or another in our lives, with many of us having that sense during the pandemic. Dealing with grief and sudden loss, Koiter takes us on a roller coaster of emotions, but her words resonate no matter the readers’ experiences.

Her opening poem, “Easter Night,” establishes the atmosphere of hope even in the darkness where there is the chill of services and the heels sinking into grass: “Since yesterday, the earth has tilted./The day’s last light curves/differently over my arm/on its habitual armrest, then dims/and dims to night.//What will I do with darkness in this new life?//” (pg. 1)

Koiter’s poems are otherworldly, like we’re swimming in her thoughts and trying to make sense of things like she is.

In “The Messy Girl Drives Eastward, with Impending Migraine,” her lines call to the beautiful topsy-turvy nature she’s experiencing: “Lines of birds shift in the air like words that cannot stay still/on the page, latecomers looking for a place/in an already crowded field.” Or the young girl pushing her way onto the swing set “as if/I had never left, as if I could insist/there be no world without me” in “Samsara.” (pg. 42)

As readers move through the collection, grief surfaces and falls beneath the surface. In “After Thanksgiving,” the narrator is eating brandied cranberries in yogurt, but not because she loves these leftovers particularly. It is because they make her feel closer to her mother.

The mind is always churning, it is worrying like the narrator who “worries scab after scab” in “The Messy Girl Carries a Torch for the Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing.” And in “Live Portrait” where the painter is getting the model’s image on the canvas and only “The portrait can bear/the weight of all that/looking”.

So Much of Everything by Jenn Koiter a ball of our anxieties unraveled until we can do little more than see them for what they are — weights we place squarely on our own shoulders and those that we don’t. The trick is to discern which anxieties we can handle because they are our own perceptions (which we can change) and those that are heavy with loss and grief and must be accepted. “meaning today I am at my most/human, meaning I am not okay and/I’m okay” (pg.76) And it is okay to be on that precipice of everything.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Jenn Koiter is a writer, marketer, entrepreneur and breathworker. The winner of the 2021 DC Poet Project, Jenn’s debut poetry collection, “So Much of Everything,” was published in 2021 by Day Eight. Her poems and essays have appeared in Barrelhouse, Smartish Pace, Bateau, Ruminate, Copper Nickel and other journals. She lives in Washington, D.C., with three gerbils named Sputnik, Cosmo and Unit. Visit her on Twitter.