Burning of the Three Fires

Advance Praise

“Something charming, something sacred, and something wickedly fun collide and collaborate in Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s book. In poetry that is both art and performance, ‘no circumstance is ordinary’: Beaumont disrobes words to reveal their true skins—embarrassing stretch marks and all, she reconfigures phrases to construct surprising new angles from familiar lines, and, mediumlike, she invites the spirits of other poets to the inventive dance between writer and muse. Enter Burning of the Three Fires and keep a close watch for the magic that is neither trick nor gimmick but pure ‘otherwordly’ mystery.”
—Rigoberto González

“Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s Burning of the Three Fires is a wonderful witches’ brew of the past, the future, the domestic, and the decidedly pop. Her hyperattention will make you notice the magic of our every day lives. Whether she is interrogating Sylvia Plath with her trusty 8-Ball or being guided in the kitchen by her ancestors, the speakers in Beaumont’s poems will put you under their spell. Burning of the Three Fires brims with truly enchanting poetry.”
—Denise Duhamel

“Near the end of the first poem in Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s marvelous new book, we’re told, ‘you’ve stumbled / into my humble democracy.’ And what a democracy it is! The stylistic and psychological range displayed in these pages is breathtaking. There are prose poems, sonnets, and poems in invented forms; lyrics of stunning beauty as well as fascinating narratives; poems focused on objects and poems that take us on wild rides of association; poems that spin off fairy tales, movies, and art, and poems that slyly conflate such realms, including one that projects Sylvia Plath (and the poet herself) into a renaissance diptych. What ties them all together—the constitution of this dazzling democracy—is a lively and capacious imagination combined with a linguistic inventiveness like nobody else’s.”
—Jeffrey Harrison

BOA EDITIONS 

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Curious Conduct

From Reviews of Curious Conduct

“Beaumont co-edited The Poets’ Grimm,…and a vivid fairy tale sensibility pervades her most original work in this second collection…. Some poems depend on tour-de-force conceits: one shows what rocks would say if they had their own language . . . while another gives ingenious excerpts “From the Book of the Boot.” Nineteenth-century Europe (from the Napoleonic wars to the rise of the parasol and the heyday of absinthe) makes another inspiration for Beaumont’s glittery works, whose contemporary analogues range from Brenda Hillman to James Tate.”
(Publishers Weekly, excerpt)

“Hammered out in the forge of the poet’s lively imagination, these poems invite the reader into a world strange and wondrous, full of talking objects, wise animals, historical figures, modern cultural casualties and even familiar cartoon characters . . . . Beaumont’s title is an apt umbrella for her collection: the word curious—in both its meanings of inquisitiveness and strangeness—applies not only to the subject of her poems, but also to her own poetic strategies for exploring those subjects . . . Beaumont uses her craft like a prism through which words are refracted to extract rays of meaning.”
(Home Planet News, excerpt)

BOA EDITIONS 

Placebo Effects

From Reviews of Placebo Effects

“This collection of beguiling poems, one of the five winners of the 1996 National Poetry Series, takes as its avenue into experience the palpable, quotidian objects of the intimate environment. . . . Beaumont’s way of seeing is only a step from an ancient way of interpreting the inert things that surround us as omens or animated carriers of meaning. What is the thing we see, and what does it signify? If that is in a way primitive, it is also classical.”
(Boston Globe, excerpt)

“There is nothing imaginary in the salutary joy of reading Placebo Effects. It is varied and lush, vigorous and charming. It is a multilayered harmony of observation and imagination, where the unknown is recognizable, the known is made magical. . . . These poems—in which carpets unroll like tongues and history reverses itself—are worldly yet intimate, subtle and stirring.”
(Literal Latté, excerpt)

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales

Edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont & Claudia Carlson

From Reviews of The Poets' Grimm

“One thing is for certain, The Poets' Grimm, splendidly edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson, will become a classic in the vast literature on fairy tales. It deserves to be read and studied, and it should be sold by the thousands to general readers, students, and scholars. . . . Altogether this anthology is a most welcome and appreciated addition to the world of fairy tales.”
(Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, excerpt)

“This ample collection stresses the utility of the Grimm tales to women who, like Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lucille Clifton, find in these “old wives’ tales” a repository of strong feminine imagery. But the figures and plots of the tales are too complex to countenance poets who would use the stories for mere polemics, and so the poets at hand include Galway Kinnell and Denise Duhamel, Randall Jarrell and Olga Broumas, Jane Yolen and Allen Tate. A strong, readable, uniformly high-quality anthology.”
(Booklist, excerpt)

The Poets' Grimm website

Don't Leave Hungry

When She Named Fire

Good Poems for Hard Times

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007

Letters to the World

Blues for Bill

Poetry Daily: Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website

Family Matters: Poems of Our Families

The Breath of Parted Lips,
Volume II

Starting Today: 100 Poerms for Obama's First 100 Days