Otherly
2024 Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award
by Dana Jaye Cadman
paperback, 100 pages
2026
Reviews
In Nova, Dana Jaye Cadman turns grief into a form of physics. Her father haunts these poems—under a Chevy Nova with a cigarette, returning in red nightmares to flash warnings—and so does the universe he left her alone in. Laced with ghosts and the unanswerable question of God, Cadman’s speaker moves between the cosmic and the domestic: a cat going blind, a muffin, a bull in Wyoming. She is always pressing toward connection, always asking what holds us together when everything is flying apart. “Say I both forget and never knew,” she writes—and that’s exactly it: the yearning to grasp the infinite, and the relief of letting it go. Otherworldly and stubbornly human all at once, enchanting in urgency, brave in uncertainty—Nova is one of the most alive books I have read in years.
—Tracey Knapp, author of Mouth and Swerve
Nova is, of course, the ancient news brought newly forth, in new forms, sparked and shaped and created by poet Dana Jaye Cadman, who listens. The poet is a native speaker of aliveness, in rhythmic sync with her polyvocal page, continually creating: with syndri she invents a new three-cornered poem-home. Her voice is at least in triplicate: a portal, biosphere, and archive—following its own echo into ancestral utterances of grief and joy and wonder, with cosmic clarity, fluent in Future. For these poems know cycles and patterns; these short lines have long memories. These poems remember you.
—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of Tanya and The Octopus Museum
About the Author
Dana Jaye Cadman is a poet and fiction writer. Nova formerly placed as finalist in the Jake Adam York Prize, Georgia Poetry Prize, and Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in New England Review, North American Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Southeast Review, Four Way Review, Saturday Evening Post, and Conduit Magazine, among others, and has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and a Pushcart Prize. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at Pace University. Find her work at danajaye.com.
