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Always After Our Fall

Jessicca Daigle

Winner of 2010 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, Finalist in Arts & Letters 2010 Poetry Award and in Ruminate Magazine's 2010 Poetry Awards.
Publication: August 2011
Pages: 40

Jacqueline Kolosov:
“Like the painting of Vermeer, Jessicca Daigle’s alluring debut collection privileges the reader with moments so quiet they are all too often overlooked by others, despite the indelible ways in which they mark and transform an individual life. Alongside lyrical meditations on what it means to be a daughter, a lover, and especially a mother, Always After Our Fall invites us to imagine and at times to reimagine the lives of other women, among them, Mary Magdalene, whose story unfolds in a sequence of sensuously realized portraits and persona poems.”

Henrietta Goodman, author of Take What You Want (Alice James Books):
“Although these poems are often focused on uniquely female experience, their mode is generosity rather than bitterness. Like the work of Anne Marie Macari, many of the poems present imagistically rich and emotionally affecting reexaminations of Biblical and archetypal female roles, but Daigle also scrutinizes contemporary experience, as in the poem, “After Leaving My Husband,” in which the concluding claim that “Something is burning” cannot be reduced to either the fire of obliteration or the fire of passion. We are not blameless, Daigle reminds us, but neither are we beyond redemption.”

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Jessicca Daigle is a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University, where she has been awarded many scholarships, fellowships, and awards. She has also been nominated for a Best New Poets 2010 Award and the AWP Intro Awards. She also was a finalist in Arts & Letters 2010 Poetry Award and in Ruminate Magazine’s 2010 Poetry Awards. Jessicca was a semi-finalist in the 2008 Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry and has been awarded a Ragdale Foundation Writing Residency in Poetry, as well as a VCCA Writing Residency in Poetry. She is an associate editor for Iron Horse Literary Reviews.