Jacqueline de Weever

JACQUELINE de WEEVER - WASTEBASKET ELEGIES AND PLYWOOD DELIGHTS

New Poems by Jacqueline de Weever. Writers have responded in many ways to seeing the cities in which they dwell become places of crisis and mass mourning. In this somber and elegant collection, Jacqueline de Weever roams Brooklyn and Manhattan to glean darkness and light as a city confronts the COVID pandemic. De Weever, as an elder poet and thus among the most vulnerable New Yorkers, studied the city as architecture and infrastructure in crisis, as public art blossoming out of stress and darkness, and as a mask over the never-ending struggle for justice against violence. Amid a masked and boarded-up New York, the poet found unexpected bursts of hope in the streets, and has revealed them here in terse and understated poems, like watercolors of a near-Apocalypse, or a butterfly at the edge of a volcanic crater.

In a prefatory page, the poet writes: “Anguish floated on the breezes blowing through New York City as we tried desperately to keep ourselves alive. Some of us awoke to the sight of refrigerated trucks waiting outside hospitals to receive the dead. In upper Manhattan, some awoke to ‘Flower Flash,’ installations donated by Lewis Miller Designs. Black trash baskets, old telephone booths, subway entrances appeared stuffed or garlanded with flowers. The florist’s night work became altars of mourning and remembrance.”

This is the 307th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published February 2023. 78 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $9.95. ISBN 9798374129694. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

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Version 1.1 Updated January 13, 2026.