Dear friends,
My heartbeat has been set. My first ever audio book is alive. & I’m a grateful poeta.
You can sample & find more info here.
All the poetry love & light,
Jenn
Girl With Death Mask now an audio book!
15 Aug 2018 Leave a comment
in Published poems Tags: Audio book poetry, Chicana poetry, Girl with Death Mask, Girlhood poetry, Jenn Givhan poetry, Latina poetry, Mexican American poetry, motherhood poetry, Survivor poetry, Violence against women poetry
My One-Hundredth Journal Publication up at Origins!
16 Sep 2015 Leave a comment
in Poems, Published poems Tags: Chicana poetry, contemporary poetry, Jenn Givhan poetry, Mexican American poetry
I’ve been working like a madwoman sending out my poems into the world nearly as long as my son has been alive (I started submitting when he was one, so I mark my poetry career by his life, because truly, I’m not sure either would have been possible without the other–how the imaginary shaped reality, how I wrote my story into existence, realizing we could adopt after writing poems about being a mother and mourning the children we’d lost to infertility and miscarriage)… Anyway, all of that to say, since he’s been alive, I’ve now published poems in one hundred journals! Today my work went up at Origins Journal, marking this moment for my poems–and I’m so thankful. For the life that brings the poems, and for the poems that keep giving to my life.
“Your body is a knife—
both slicing point
& handle.” –from “Self-Defense”
Thank you for reading!
Love,
Jenn
“Miracle of the River Pig” up at *Goblin Fruit*
23 Jun 2014 1 Comment
in Published poems Tags: Brawley, Chicana poetry, contemporary poetry, environmental poetry, feminist poetry, healing poetry, Imperial Valley fiction, Jenn Givhan poetry, La Llorona, pregnancy poems
My poem “Miracle of the River Pig”
is live today at Goblin Fruit, and you can listen to me read it there as well!
It’s a grotesque and somewhat experimental poem for me recounting my experience in the Southern California desert near the New River. I began drafting the poem in Brenda Hammack‘s fairytale workshop with The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, while I was also reading Frank Bidart’s “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky.”
I hope you enjoy! Thanks for reading! 
" — Selves like iridescent, shining, speckled shit in the Río Nuevo frothy foaming stinking desert river desert in the new world — how old were you? fifteen & blessed as Santa María, I’m that lucky pig in the river — cut my trotters, strike my blue-butt, handle me, sell me at auction, devour me." --Jenn Givhan
