A Map of Rain Days — Gallery
A Map of Rain Days long listed for The League of Canadian Poets 2021 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Brenda Clew's blurb for A Map of Rain Days
Brandon Pitts' review of A Map of Rain Days
Jennifer Hosein has established herself as an artist brave enough to harness the full spectrum of the feminine struggle. With her first collection of poems, A Map of Rain Days, she has commanded all of her artistic experience into verse, illuminating the sorrow of loss, the physical ecstasy of love, the horror of abuse, and the strength to heal and make peace with happiness—often within the same work.
ARC POETRY MAGAZINE book review by Kate Rogers
Ivy Reiss'(The Artis Magazine) review of A Map of Rain Days
Amy’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days
A Map Of Rain Days by Jennifer Hosein is filled with the harshness of life. The truth behind the facade. The pure realities of love and loss, and transformation.
These poems by Ms. Hosein evoked such emotion. I became fully immersed in her writing. Her poetry resonated with me in such a way that I could not look away. I had to continue reading. The intensity was palpable. I believe this book to be a work of art. Wonderfully done.
CAROUSEL Magazine: Blog, USERREVIEW
“My mother’s toes are / crooked and curled / in a misguided, arthritic map / of rain days,” writes Jennifer Hosein in the eponymous poem of her debut collection, A Map of Rain Days. In these lines there is a conflation of body and world, but also of space and time. Time becomes an entity that is spatially translatable and cartographically organizable. This is a conceit that manifests in a variety of ways over the course of the book, with the speaker’s personal history folding, unfolding, refolding in non-chronological complexity, often as not invoked by a particular locale being seen or remembered. Like rain, which comes and goes, is here and not, but is always, always (and necessarily) returning, the speaker’s suffering is not presented as a phenomenon that she will progress beyond or definitively escape from. There is no world without rain, and trauma is a recurrent (but never ceaseless or omnipresent) element of the speaker’s environment. Alternating between vivacious and restrained, Hosein’s poems are alive to the panoply of human experience.
Padmaja Reddy’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days
‘A Map of Rain Days’ by Jennifer Hosein narrates vivid experiences encompassing love, exile, romance and history. Her tone is powerful and bruised.
Most of the poems in the First section are crafted ‘Mother’ as the central point. Those include ‘Heart’, ‘January’, ‘Breath’.
Beautiful expressions like ‘Beloved Mother is a clipped-winged bird that floats around in lace’, ‘Walking down in corridors in mother’s bruised shoes’ charm the readers.
Mother and daughter gift words to each other every day in ‘Waiting’. And the daughter has no place left to put the sorrow handed by the mother.
Violence in love is painted so brilliant – ‘when your words knock me to the floor, I pick up the pieces and walk away.’
Love for mother and daughter as well as loss of a dear friend, American election, racism become central themes of certain poems.
Jennifer’s style is affluent and sensuous.
Anna T.’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days
I devoured the book in one sitting. I woke up, and I reread it, revisiting some poems that spoke to my soul. It’s an emotional, intimate collection of poems covering several diverse topics, including the death of a loved one, being in love, suicide, racism, loneliness. The book is divided into chapters. It feels like the poet is holding our hand, inviting us on a journey with her, allowing us to discover different chapters of her life.
Eindra Lin’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days
‘this is a seriously beautiful collection of fragile poems. the imagery in here is fantastic and hosein’s style and voice are so unique. these poems are like bruises in the way that it doesn’t hurt if you run over it lightly but the second you press in just a bit deeper the wound begins to sting. there is a real fragility and delicacy in the way hosein paints love and history and relationships and family. it feels so brutal but soft at the same time. i loveddd hosein’s imagery and metaphors it was so realistic yet intricately whimsical.
Ari’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days
My brother
has no time
for the heart-breakingness
of the oldand I have no place left
to put the sorrow
she hands to me.
The poems in this collection are each a culmination of the mundane pain we all feel everyday, and yet Hosein writes it such that you are introduced to it altogether anew. In Waitingwe are met with a mother awaiting her son, and the daughter forgotten save for the company she provides, and I find it so beautifully heart-wrenching. Wedding Day gave me the goosebumps at how savage it can be to ache.
There are some pieces that are more abstract than the others, and I love them too because of my love for abstract poetry, and there are some that are just so concrete and cutting that you could bleed on them.
Hosein here has written a brilliant collection that pulls at your heart and chews at its strings, only to leave you winded once you’re through with the book.