Jeannine Hall Gailey
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with MS who served as Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of six books of poetry, including Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award, and her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. Her work appeared in journals like The American Poetry Review, JAMA, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She’s also the author of PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2007 she received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and in 2007 and 2011 a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.
2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:
Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.
Calamity
Your family is coming over for Thanksgiving.
Even worse, it’s snowing.
Headless robots are playing soccer with your soul.
UFOs have been sighted overhead.
A meteor is definitely heading straight for you.
It might miss, but then again.
Tonight a city is being decimated by Godzilla,
or was it a bunch of genetically-engineered dinosaurs?
Either way, I hope you’re lizard-friendly.
Tonight you have to give a speech
and that girl who hated you in third grade
will be in the audience. What have I ever done
to deserve this? the prophet asks, tearing his robes
in the desert. God responds: How long you got?
A plague of egrets, of eaglets, of egress.
A black hole has just opened up and it is
already swallowing someone else’s sun.
Did you see the team play last night? A travesty.
Someone is always preaching about doomsday.
Who are you wearing? Because this night
your life will be required of you. Grab a bag,
a sword, a water bottle. Go out swinging.
