Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. She has published five full collections of poems: I entered without words, the spiders my arms, Translations from Bark Beetle, Rooms and Their Airs, and Stone Crop. Her work has appeared widely in magazines, including Poetry, Orion, Ecopoetics, and Ploughshares. She has translated forty books from French, including Every Minute Is First, a posthumous collection of French poet Marie-Claire Bancquart; Geneviève Damas’s If You Cross the River; Jean Giono’s Serpent of Stars; and Pierre Michon’s Small Lives, which won the Florence Gould and French-American Foundation Translation Prize. A former Stegner Fellow, she has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Centre National du Livre de France Translation Grants. Her work also includes site-specific installations that explore the interface of language and ecology. She has taught in various writing programs, including Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Vermont.
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Books by Jody Gladding
This collection takes the physical, elemental world as its point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape. Some of these poems begin with the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—while others emerge from a more expansive space: a salt flat at the Great Salt Lake, a damaged woodlot.
Drawn from the environments of northern Vermont and the South of France, the poems in Rooms and Their Airs explore the interface of the human and natural worlds, further eroding that distinction with each poem.
The verse here merges subject and object, often giving voice to natural phenomena—a vernal pool, a fossil, a beam of light. These poems sparkle with humor, sophisticated word play, and intellectual examination, reflecting an elegant and contagious curiosity about history, language, and the world.
Books translated by Jody Gladding
From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of education.