“Employing the golden age of Hollywood as a frame, Madcap is a swirling, cinematic wonder filled with frankincense, velvet settees, heart-shaped glasses, taxidermy, and vampires. Deftly deranging syntax to create vertiginous imagistic unfurlings…Janeshek’s work is Lynchian in its exquisite, delicious strangeness. There is a jewel-edged intensity to this book as it scrutinizes beauty, misogyny, blood-soaked narratives, and hegemonic structures; it is where celluloid dreams encounter noir nightmares often resulting in crime scene tape. Much like the iconic figure of the femme fatale, Madcap is intelligent, darkly erotic, dangerous, subversive, and seductive.”
--Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush and Wolf Centos
“Jessie Janeshek’s Madcap takes place in the gadfly underground, papered in Hollywood regency blood spatter, painted in smudged red lacquer. Here, everyone knows madcap on the carpet and noir in the bathtub are two sides of the same coin, maybe on the same night. Banter and eulogy. Bourbon and baby. Sex and death. Then and now. There’s more weather than you would expect, but it’s often Christmas in Los Angeles. It’s often midnight on the soundstage, in the forest, at the stag bar. Turn the page, fix your manicure. “But this isn’t rock bottom. It takes so long to find the right trail.” The plot twists, doubles back, and leads us deeper into winter, Janeshek's icy silver screen.”
—Danielle Pafunda, author of The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
“If noir were a coin, Jessie Janeshek’s Madcap would be the rusted, scratched-up side where you can “put all your poison into one place / and run to the river.” These poems are darker than the noir we’re used to and I’m glad for it. With old Hollywood glamor and a sharp, Gothic veneer, Janeshek’s poems meander and twist across the page, surprising with their bluntness and vivid imagery. “I don’t need more horror dry to the touch” says the speaker. That’s not a worry here—Madcap’s resin will stick with you long after you put the book down (and it won’t be long until you’re back for more).”
—Nate Logan, author of Inside the Golden Days of Missing You
“Madcap deserves mention alongside Ashbery’s ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ and Anne Sexton’s Transformations. Janeshek brings the subversion of Cindy Sherman to contemporary poetry, using classic Hollywood tropes and other Pop material to comment on gender and the mediated performance of self.”
—William Lessard, editor, Heavy Feather Review
“Jessie Janeshek’s poetry vaporizes the walls in my brain, and floods it with visceral, musical, magical, sensual rapture. It’s hypnotic post-punk witchcraft streaming live from the deserts of the subconscious; it’s feral forest creatures & frisky mountain housewives eating mushrooms and reading each other’s dream journals. In other words, it’s my favorite poetry on Earth right now, and The Shaky Phase is an exemplary collection of it.”
—Joseph P. O’Brien, Managing Editor of FLAPPERHOUSE
“Danger lurks in these poems and one can almost hear the black and white film and see the dust motes in its strong, white light…Supernoir is like smeared Vaseline over a long-view lens trained into the dark corners of rooms where things go down: it’s real and raw, with the edges blurred out for effect—and in all the right places.”
—Michelle Reale, Rag Queen Periodical
“Jessie Janeshek’s poems teach you how to shoulder them by shouldering you. It gets so there are way more shoulders than bodies then they teach you to body. The body in question opens its coat revealing steam enough for all your pressing needs, a landscape of singing snakes and messages carved up from under your skin, as the body questions its chalk outline until it quivers into lace. All the voices say ‘step right up,’ so step right up.”
—Michael Sikkema, author of Die Die Dinosaur