in backwards chronological order

Jessy Randall. How to Tell If You Are Human. Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, October 2018. 80 pages. $20. ISBN 978-0807169841. Cover design by David Wojciechowski. 

How to Tell If You Are Human is a collection of 80 poems made from diagrams in withdrawn library books. In it, straightforward instructions for playground games become ambiguous descriptions of complex emotions. Illustrations of household objects used for German language-learning become melancholic feminist ruminations. A map of a museum now helps visitors find a good place to make out. The signifiers for identifying different types of beetles are removed and replaced with statements from a bunch of pervs.

Sample diagram poems online in Poetry, Rattle, and elsewhere, and in print in Gargoyle, Jubilat, and The Best American Experimental Writing 2015.

advance praise
“Jessy Randall has create the ultimate user manual for human existence. Finally, it all makes sense! — Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky
“If you’re not sure you’re human, Jessy Randall’s diagram poems might help. There is something true (truth = heartbreak + hilarity + humility) in how she charts our bizarre behaviors, diagrams our paranoid fantasies, and blueprints our vulnerable questions. In her poems, we’re pixels and little, walking cosmoses all at once. This book kills me and whether I’m animated code or a bag of energy, I’m definitely coming back. — Sommer Browning, author of Backup Singers
“A how-to book that is also a poetry book that is also a book of images that also interrogates the notion of poetic imagery itself. How To Tell If You Are Human is a playful and intriguing work. — Amy Fusselman, author of Savage Park and Idiophone 
Jessy Randall maps her imagination onto the world—or, at least, onto the world’s ephemera. Lost charts, diagrams, and instruction booklets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: in Randall’s hands, these are the fecund materials that compose our age. She writes onto/into these artifacts of the past in order to illuminate our confounding present. How To Tell If You Are Human is a deadpan triumph of poetic repurposing and Randall one of visual poetry’s most restlessly inventive practitioners. — Johnny Damm, author of The Science of Things Familiar

reviews
“The impression I get is of someone who is desperate for answers and locked in an outdated library, grabbing book after book to see what truth reveals itself. In other words, the book enacts my exact feeling about the world most days. It’s inscrutable, and it comes without a clear answer manual…” — Karen Craigo, Better View of the Moon
“Do you ever find yourself feeling out of sorts, unable to tell if you’re still human? Jessy Randall has considered this feeling and helps readers handle it with an instructional manual of sorts…” — Katy Haas, NewPages
“…there is an appeal here for many sorts of readers: those who enjoy formal experimentation, those who dig the line-surprise, as well as those who turn to art so that they may say, ‘yes, this is what my life is like.’ The book displays a certain force of thought, one that causes appreciation and introspection. It also forces a reconsideration of why poets make poems the way they make them, and of the hilarious, infuriating chore of being human.” — Hayden Bergmann, The Literary Review
“Randall’s How to Tell If You Are Human splits the atom of consciousness; it challenges the reader aesthetically and it exudes intellectual comfort. In short, it fundamentally mirrors the growth of our inner beings. — Judy Swann, The Mom Egg [Swann compares the work with that of Laurie Anderson, Miranda July, and Gertrude Stein, !!!]
Heavy Feather top pick for 2018; Sundress Publications feature at the Wardrobe, March 2020.
“… encompassing a dizzying range of personal experiences … helps to raise our understanding of the bewildering set of interactions a person must navigate on a daily basis …”  — Paul David Adkins, The Bookends Review

publicity
(Does this tattoo count as publicity?)
“Jessy Randall Publishes Book of Visual Poetry,” Colorado College, September 2018
Non-humans respond to the book

Jessy Randall. Suicide Hotline Hold Music. Red Hen Press, April 2016. 101 pages. $11.95. ISBN: 978-1-59709-726-0

Suicide Hotline Hold Music is a collection of poems (mostly short ones) and poetry comics (poorly-drawn mostly-text sometimes-funny things). A human pretends to be a machine in order to provide comfort anonymously. We are made to consider the epic meaning of middle school pantsing. Hearts are broken and mended. Children play with My Little Robot Pony. A troll keeps a food diary. Everyone’s hair has a sound effect.

sample poems
Suicide Hotline Hold Music reprinted from the book in Verse Daily, June 2016; included in the iHeartRADIO podcast “Words by Winter,” February 2021.
The Wave of Pantsing in Umbrella
Everyone’s Hair in Middle School in McSweeney’s
Food Diary of Gark the Troll in Strange Horizons
Crackling Octopus in Star*Line
Dream of the Avant-Garde song version composed and recorded by David Kay as part of his “Dumb Poems for Smart Phones” project:

sample comics
FemGeniuses
Rattle

advance praise
“Jessy Randall playfully expands the boundaries of both poetry and comics.” — James Kochalka, creator of American Elf
“You might be wondering what the hell is going on. There was the Big Bang and now we have all this crap. Jessy Randall’s poems will help. Funny, playful and vibrating magic from the quotidian, these poems and comics, if they don’t solve all universal riddles for you, will reintroduce wonder to your heart.” — Scott Poole, house poet for Public Radio International’s Live Wire!

reviews
“Makes you feel like someone else on this planet gets you. Like actually gets you.” — Sara Kafka, The Gloss
“a low-key, ordinary walk through a surprising otherworld” — Siham Karami, TheThe
“comforting in its honest strangeness … for those who like the weird and playful, Randall’s poetry provides an unconventional approach on how to deal with what life gives us.” — Hannah Cohen, Mom Egg Review
“so funny, and so, so tender and true.” — Kathleen Kirk, Escape into Life
“Randall is turning into a profoundly good lyric poet who, because she has shed pretense as well as dilettantism, may be one of the best currently writing.” — Daniel Casey, Misanthropester
Panorama of the Mountains compares the book to Kate Beaton’s Step Aside, Pops and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends.
“…makes the reader want to slap her forehead and exclaim, ‘Why didn’t I see that?!’ “– Kaye Lynne Booth, Writing to Be Read
“You’ll laugh out loud and perhaps feel like you’ve been punched in the gut with some realness.” — Han Sayles, Mountain Fold Books

Jessy Randall. There Was an Old Woman. Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 2015. Small format (approx. 5 x 4 inches), 66 pages. Softcover ISBN 978-0-87775-941-6, $12; hardcover 978-0-87775-942-3, $20. Signed, limited edition of 26 copies, $35. Order online from Unicorn Press.

In this rollicking collection of prose poems, Jessy Randall brings new life to the women of Mother Goose’s fairy tales. With enthralling wit, There Was an Old Woman delights in unexpected portrayals of Mother Goose’s classic protagonists: old women from a variety of towns across the English landscape who live in shoes, who sell cows and sometimes their children. Randall’s new fairy tales inhabit a world simultaneously old and modern, inviting us to consider the parallels between the lives of Mother Goose’s women and the lives of women today.

“Good, awful fun” — Aaron Cohick

“Quirky and funny … (with) no shortage of feminism” — Panorama of the Mountains

Sample poems in Cease, Cows, matchbook, Menacing Hedge, Really System, and Unbroken.

Jessy Randall. Injecting Dreams into Cows. Red Hen Press, September 2012. 101 pages. $17.95. ISBN: 9781597092302

sample poems
Why I Had Children on a truck (poem is here)
Muppet Suite originally published in The Nervous Breakdown
Your Brain featured in Verse Daily
Rich People’s Umbrellas read by Emily Lloyd for the Poetry Foundation’s Record-a-Poem project
The Consultant (source of the title)
Phone Sex with You
Robot in a Maze

advance praise
“Jessy Randall’s poems are beyond predicting — some touching, some hilarious — full of fresh insights and some nice wildnesses.” — X.J. Kennedy
“Were I a doctor, I’d prescribe Jessy Randall. Specifically, a poem-a-day, although I know the poem will not stay put in its prescription. It’ll gurgle, thinking about growing fur. It’ll unvelcro itself, step out of itself and morph into many brilliances, into many heavens in grains of sand. No, it’ll morph into a thousand, glowing (hugely-glowing) melon spoons. Thank you Jessy Randall.” — Kate Northrop
“Jessy Randall’s poems might be described as sassy — they’re bold & confident & they always seem to get the last word, casually dropping a bomb on the carefully orchestrated scene. In short, they’re smart; they know exactly when to hold back and when to release, when to demur and when to devastate. — Nate Pritts

reviews
“Jessy Randall’s Injecting Dreams into Cows attempts to dismantle quibbles by critics who claim they are unable to engage with new poetry … Randall has created a time kabob that’s both relevant and engrossing by successfully skewering the past, present, and future.” — L.A. Grove, The California Journal of Poetics
“[‘The Consultant‘ is] The best science poem you’ll read this month…” — Annalee Newitz, io9
“[Randall]’s scope is kaleidoscopic … She digs deep and explores all the emotions in the crayon box—and we love her for it.” — Sandra Knauf, Rattle
“[Randall’s] language is clean and precise, which allows her to sneak-attack the reader with profound images. … This collection solidifies her reputation as a talent to watch.” — CL Bledsoe, Rain Taxi
“I’m guessing [Jessy Randall] would be a cool chick to hang out with.” — Lori Hettler, The Next Best Book Blog
“Witty and inspiring…” — Nicelle Davis, The Bees Knees (highly recommended)

interviews: Little Myths | Nervous Breakdown | The Colorado Poet

Sydney Writers’ Festival street-cleaning truck: CC | Gazette

Other stuff: non-alcoholic drinks list

Jessy Randall and Daniel M. Shapiro. Interruptions: Collaborative Poems. Pecan Grove Press, August 2011. 56 pages. $15.00. ISBN: 9781931247900.

Here you’ll find poems about robots, werewolves, Cheetos, math, and David Bowie. Randall and Shapiro bring out the weirdness in each other in the best possible way.

sample poems
Mundane Dreams in McSweeney’s; Othniel Smith’s film
Four poems in Connotation Press
Two poems in Hamilton Stone Review
Two poems in Salt River Review
Weather Report in Shampoo

advance praise
“At once multivoiced and seamlessly intertwined, a melancholic conversation being conducted over great distances.” — Steven Hayward

reviews
“The poems ‘feel’ satisfyingly right rather than ‘working’ logically… These poems grew on me more and more with every reading. Many seemed a tad puzzling at first but soon I, too, was having more than ‘Mandatory Fun.’” — Moira Richards, Off the Coast
A lively, playful collection of poems … Randall and Shapiro are on a mission here to return poetry to the general reader, and conversely to return the language and experience of everyday people to poetry itself.” — Kristofer Collins, Pittsburgh Magazine
“Funny as they are, some of these poems also bite or have claws or a poetic undercurrent of melancholy and profundity.” — Kathleen Kirk, Escape Into Life
Four out of five stars from Kaye Lynne Booth, Southern Colorado Examiner

interviews
with Bob King in The Colorado Poet
with CL Bledsoe in Murder Your Darlings
with Kathleen Kirk in Escape Into Life
with each other

Jessy Randall. The Wandora Unit. Ghost Road Press, October 2009. Hardback. $17.95. ISBN: 9780981652580.

advance praise
“The Wandora Unit is like a John Hughes movie about the Bloomsbury Group. Funny, poetic and charming, Jessy Randall’s novel about growing up in a literary magazine shows why the greatest friendships are the ones that can’t last.” — Charlie Anders (Choir Boy, She’s Such a Geek).
“Witty, lyrical, and shimmering with laugh-out-loud moments. This unconventional exploration of a friendship gone awry captures the everyday poetry of high school.” — Todd Mitchell (The Traitor King).
“Jessy Randall captures what is perfectly confusing, wonderful, and bittersweet about friendships and high school. — Michelle Sewell (Just Like a Girl).

reviews
“What makes [the book] sing is the pitch-perfect glimpse into the lives of precocious, intellectual teens who are, of course, just as confused, conflicted, and insecure as everyone else.” — Bitch Magazine
“An implicitly feminist book from a hard-working small press that deserves a little attention” — newsletter of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association.
“Comical, heart-breaking, and lyrical” — Eclectica Magazine
“Brilliantly captures the essential qualities of high school friendships” —Write4Children
“Full of interesting, offbeat characters, The Wandora Unit is a quiet study of relationships, group dynamics, teenage life in a small town, and how the people around us shape who we are. — Teens Read Too
The poems [in the magazine at the end] are made of equal parts teen-age anxiety and aspiration, and they’re good, too.” — Bookbag blog
“Chock full of great poetry.” — Colorado Springs Gazette
“I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that better or as unselfconsciously captures the intimacy and idiosyncrasies of a high school clique. … The Galaxy crew have inside jokes, think they are the funniest and smartest people in the world, and they are doomed.” — lower east side librarian zine

more
photo of the manuscript in process at Hit and Run.

Jessy Randall. A Day in Boyland. Ghost Road Press, 2007. 86 pages. $13.95. ISBN: 0-9789456-5-4

sample poems
A Day in Boyland
Boys on Bikes
The Revenge

Ted Kooser featured Superhero Pregnant Woman in his American Life in Poetry column on November 8, 2007. It is also available at the Poetry Foundation website, and has been made into a student video!

A Day in Boyland was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

advance praise
“Jessy Randall’s poems arrive like gifts when it isn’t even your birthday. Witty, deliciously bite-sized, frisky, strange and real as dreams, these are poems you will savor and show your pals.” — David Graham
“Makes you want to jump on the couch and yell, I love this poet! These are the poems of the alien child of James Tate, Russell Edson, Richard Brautigan and Lee Upton: Four Thumbs Up. — Leonard Gontarek

reviews
“The only good science fiction poems ever written are by Jessy Randall … Sometimes sarcastic, sometime full of awe and sadness, Randall’s poems are smart, lovely observations for people whose emotional landscapes are populated by imaginary beings no less poignant than real ones.” — Annalee Newitz, io9
Josie Mills compares A Day in Boyland to Liz Phair’s album Exile in Guyville, and says “You will find yourself both savoring and gobbling up each poem in this collection.” — Rattle
A Day in Boyland “will help we feminist readers keep our smile on.” — Girlistic
Valparaiso Poetry Review recommended books list, 2008.
[A Day in Boyland put] “feathery notes on my heart” — Kathleen Kirk, 2021 Sealey Challenge.

interviews
Five-minute interview with Noel Black at KRCC, November 8, 2007.
Poetry Show with Dona Stein at KRFC, January 6, 2008.

science fiction (selected)

Analog: Hertha Ayrton with online interview, First Scientist, more
Asimov’s: A Different Kind of Stupid, I Have a Remote, The Mirror Speaks, Annie Jump Cannon, Helen Taussig, more
Mythic Delirium: Maybe a Witch Lives There
Nature: ‘If I Could Travel in Time’ by Zed 5755; German translation in Spektrum
Scientific American: Elizabeth Agassiz
Strange Horizons: Cassini’s Mini-Packets Home, Food Diary of Gark the Troll, more

chapbooks and such

What If You Were Happy for Just One Second: Instructional Diagrams, with Daniel M. Shapiro, BOAAT Press, 2014. Free digital book.

Dorothy Surrenders, electronic, illustrated chapbook of Wizard of Oz poems, 2River, 1999.

and also
Brain, Child: Breastfeeding Tips from the Experts

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Everyone’s Hair in Middle School, New Pay-Per-View Channels, Mundane Dreams, and What the People Who Used to Live in My House Apparently Said to Each Other Before Selling It to Me. Plus, in Mountain Man Dance Moves: McSweeney’s Book of Lists: Seven Things Total Strangers Apparently Think It’s Perfectly Appropriate to Say to a Woman Discreetly Breastfeeding in Public.

Verbatim: The Language Quarterly: Wizard Words: The Literary, Latin, and Lexical Origins of Harry Potter’s Vocabulary, Spring 2001. Historifans: ABRACA…TURNINTOAPRINCEGUY: Spells and Magical Objects in Harry Potter, February 2023.

Guest editor, Snakeskin theme issues:
fatherhood, motherhood, deadly sins, fairy tales, libraries, the alphabet, school, collaborations, toys, work, food, found poems, poetrycomics, monsters, friendship, numbers/mathematics, 
cryptozoology, music, and science fiction.

Interviews in Analog, Catalyst, The Colorado Poet, E-Words, Folded Word Press, Hairstreak Butterfly, Interstellar Flight, Poemeleon, Murder Your Darlings, Escape into Life, and Little Myths. Audio interviews at Lost Women of Science, Delving In, KRFC, and at KRCC about A Day in Boyland and things found in books.

watercolors of portapotties (I take requests)

library shenanigans