Consolation: Poems by Lee Jenkins

Praise for Consolation:  Poems by Lee Jenkins:

“What a blessing this book is! But why should I be surprised, when I have already discovered the brilliance and beauty of Lee Jenkins’s poetry? I want to mention favorites, but every single poem is replete with wisdom. Just a few of the most unforgettable: ‘Instinct,’ ‘Touching under the Table,’ ‘We Must Love Our Friends. ’If we thought we knew how to live before reading this book, we didn’t. Lee Jenkins knows the right questions to ask, which is why he has the right answers.”
—IRENE WILLIS, Poetry Editor, InternationalPsychoanalysis.net, Author, Rehearsal poems, and Green Dialogue

“Consolation pulls us into love relations, race relations, city and country life, sometimes enlivened by birds and flowers. All the nuances here are seen through a poet’s eyes. Lee Jenkins’s language of feeling is filtered through a psychoanalytic lens making us pay attention to the everyday and not so everyday occurrences that we might otherwise overlook. He shows us stirrings of beauty, hate and conflict reminding us that often life’s consolations are not consoling enough.”
—LUCILLE SPIRA, PhD, Editor, Rage and Creativity: How Feminism Sparked Psychoanalysis

Consolation is a trove of realized feelings in special moments, some personal, some shared with the world of thinking people, all in touch with the here and now of a poet. Each poem bears rereading and some even are worth memorizing- the highest achievement of poetry. —ARLENE KRAMER RICHARDS, EdD, psychoanalyst, Author, Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand

“Reading Lee Jenkins’s Consolation is a joyful, thought-provoking, and elevating experience. I was moved by the depth of emotion, the keen wisdom and quiet humor with which he conveys, in beautifully simple and precise language, his observations on everyday life and the existential questions that pose themselves to him as a man, a black man, a lover, a husband, a father, a friend, a psychoanalyst, a gardener, and a New Yorker.”
—PETER ZIMMERMANN, PhD, President, NPAP; Editor, Training & Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology

LEE JENKINS is a retired professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, a poet, novelist, and psychoanalyst practicing in Manhattan. He has a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He received his psychoanalytic training from the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). He has served as Instructor, Supervisor, and Training Analyst at Blanton-Peale Institute, The Harlem Family Psychoanalytic Institute, and NPAP. He is the author of Faulkner and Black-White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach (1981); a book of poems, Persistence of Memory (1996); a novel, Right of Passage (2018).