Critical Commentary
From endorsements of her book, Madonna, Complex (Cascade Books 2020):
"Jen Stewart Fueston’s poems embody the audacious kind of sainthood we need right now—muddied, carnal, ecstatic: possessed with an astonishment to stay awake. The forces that singe Isaiah’s lips with a red-hot coal, embolden Thomas’s fingers into the side of a savior, emblazon Joan of Arc to resist an empire, and fever a hallowed mother with enough grief and courage to sing—those same ardent tongues speak in Madonna, Complex. With self-possessed passion and graceful intelligence, Fueston crafts poems vivid in image and form, fraught with contrast and defiance. This attentive collection names the charms and suspicions of the body, the intricate good and damage of faith, and chooses the beautiful tangibilities of the concrete moment over the abstractions and conjectures of an inherited, idealized of heaven. Sketching in light and shadow, Fueston refuses to waver from the vapor that we are and her poems willfully resist the simplistic roads of denial or faith in favor of cradling the world—all of it."
—Dave Harrity, author of These Intricacies and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf
"What is the shape of desire? What is the half-life of belief? And what makes gospel the word that mends rather than tears? In this stunning first collection, Jennifer Stewart Fueston invites us to join her pilgrimage as, turn after turn, she questions the structures we thought to be stable. Interweaving philosophical reflections on 'the part of us that knows its knowing' with psalm, protest, and play, Madonna, Complex draws together the parts of our selves that we did not know were split. The comma splicing the title reflects the complex jointure upon which each poem builds. It is the shape of the newborn asleep on the chest and the self in the mirror suddenly strange. It is the imagining of stories that might have been otherwise as well as the body 'curv[ing] away from glory, like we all do.' Together, these poems shake the foundations of belief to release it from the forms that have held it captive. So that we, too, might one day wander into 'formless air' and 'call it holy.’"
—Kristin George Bagdanov, author of Fossils in the Making and Diurne
