S A T O R I
Member
About-Jim Lenfestey
Bio
After a career in academia, marketing communications and journalism on the editorial board of the Minnesota StarTribune, where he won several Page One awards for excellence, since 2000 Lenfestey has published eight collections of poems, two collections of personal essays, edited three poetry anthologies and co-edited Robert Bly in This World, University of Minnesota Press.
His haibun memoir, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award. His sixth poetry collection, A Marriage Book:50 Years of Poems from a Marriage (Milkweed Editions), was a finalist for two 2017 Midwest book awards. In 2020 he received the Kay Sexton Award for significant contributions and leadership in the Minnesota Literary Community. In November 2024 Milkweed Editions published his eighth poetry collection, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements.
For fifteen years he chaired the popular Literary Witnesses poetry program in Minneapolis and led a summer poetry class on Mackinac Island, Michigan. He currently serves on the boards of Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota, the Hellbender Gathering of Poets in North Carolina, and is the founder of Poets, Writers and Musicians Against the War on the Earth. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife the journalist Susan Lenfestey. They have four children and ten grandchildren. www.coyotepoet.com
Artist Statement
An exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life.
In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, poet James P. Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body—heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more—and astonishment at the powers of language: “the sound of ‘n,’” our ancient alphabet, “the terror of publishing.” Known for
his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda’s cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, “the language of crow,” fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the “forgiveness of the Catbird” and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.
Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”