Jill Pearlman


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Pub. Finishing Line Press, August 2025
Cover Design by Raina Wellman

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Diaspora of Things is a Proustian tale, at once ordinary and nightmarish. In the dismantling of her mother’s home, the speaker finds that dispossession has liberated things: they acquire a life of their own. It stirs up anarchic, chaotic energy. Nothing is excluded from the rites of possession and dispossession, including the poet's identity.  Just as she assesses, she is re-assessed; as she feels, she is felt. In the paradox of chaos, she finds multiple voices. A paired chapbook sequence, “Capital G,” will be published in early 2026 in Ravenna Press’s Triple Series.

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Written in the midst of a loved one’s home being dismantled and her possessions dispersed, Jill Pearlman‘s poems are by turns filigreed and laden with the “thingy flesh” between lost and losing. Diaspora of Things evinces the immanence of objects “freed from the daze of possession,” holding close and honoring both the degree to which we imagine our lives by way of our possessions and the real role that our things play in binding us to the world and each other. Replete with grief, tenderness, and the self-bereavement that is intrinsic to living, Diaspora of Things is a tribute to our “stranger selves.”

–Kate Colby, author of Paradoxx and I Mean

Jill Pearlman‘s Diaspora of Things is part catalogue of objects–“Crystal birdspeak,” “Leopard stoolspeak”–and part meditation on the opulence of grief, as a daughter navigates family history while settling her mother’s estate. This is a collection about possessions and minor obsessions–evocative in its juxtapositions (as in a vase from Marshall’s at home next to the Frank Stella)–and a meditation on memory, emptiness, art and the mysteries of impermanence, where “perishability becomes a hardened thing.” Sadness is “laquered with elegance,” and even “the soft pencil” jottings of a “life together” urge the unsaid to be articulated. Diaspora of Things is a moving amalgam, in which the speaker asks “How to hold the self?” and–as intimate witness–brings the reader along, as she moves towards her own conclusion.

–Tina Cane, author of Year of the Murder Hornet

Jill Pearlman‘s poems mourn and reanimate her deceased mother. Through scraps of dialogue, they convey her mother’s wit and panache and appetite for life and they catalogue the “diaspora of things” her mother collected and loved. Among these are crystal birds, a jade flower bouquet, a silver lamp with a beaded shade, and “stacks and stacks of napkins—so beautifully ironed, the creases would break your heart.” The light cast by the objects throws into relief the contours of the poet’s loss, her realization that, through it all, she and her mother share “this fabric,/this flesh, this tissue”; the reader comes  to understand the grieving process in new and startling ways.

–Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made and Given Away