On Jeffrey Pethybridge

I've known Jeff since 1996 when, as my undergraduate student at Old Dominion University, he first attended one of several classes we would have together. The high level of his energy, his seriousness, his palpable joy in reading and shaping poetry was immediately apparent, and it was soon thereafter that he became more a collaborator than a student. He is now, once again, my student in the English Ph.D. program at University of Missouri, studying here with Sherod Santos, Lynne McMahon, and myself. As any one of the above-named poets will attest, Jeff is the genuine article, a passionate student of language, possessor of a brilliant mind, and a young poet whose work has already attained a level of intellectual acuity that is uncommon among poets in general, and especially rare among young, emerging poets.

As the work itself will demonstrate, Jeff is interested in pressing language for information, interested in constructing poetic texts that continue to yield results through successive readings, and more interested in constructing literary artifacts than in constructing narratives of self-aggrandizement.

—Scott Cairns, author of five collections of poetry, most recently Philokalia: New & Selected Poems (2002). He is professor of English at the University of Missouri.