Jane Muschenetz

Power Point

by Jane Muschenetz

ISBN: 9781962405027

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Pre-order discount until April 30: $12.80 ($2.00 US Shipping — Ships in May)

A portion of the book’s proceeds is donated by the author to organizations supporting women, girls, and gender equality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

MIT alum and former Bain & Co Management Consultant, Jane Yevgenia Muschenetz arrived in the US as a Jewish child refugee from Soviet Ukraine. She earned her BA in Political Science from UCSD, her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Business, and learned (via extensive on-the-job-training) to mother two “mostly American” kids – never once considering how much this education would aid her in the writing of poetry. Recognized in 2023 by San Diego County for excellence in poetry performance, Jane has appeared on KPBS Midday Edition and in numerous publications. Her debut collection, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay Books, 2023), is the 2024 San Diego Writers Festival Poetry Collection of the Year and a Readers’ Favorite 5 Star Book. An emerging writer and artist, Jane won The Good Life Review Honeybee Poetry Prize in 2022. Connect with Jane and more of her work online at www.PalmFrondZoo.com.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

POWER POINT, the groundbreaking short collection of feminist poetry by Jane Muschenetz, includes Best of the Net nominated, 100% MOM (Whale Road Review), Pushcart nominated, Failure to Thrive (Meat for Tea), and several genre/discipline bending poems that intersect economics, science, popular art, and literature. Too often, women and change-makers are dismissed as “hysterical, emotion-driven, irrational.” POWER POINT turns this notion on its head, presenting meticulously researched “data poems” to make the case for a more compassionate world. Blending traditional and hybrid formats, Muschenetz exposes the status quo as a malleable and subjective reality that can and must be questioned and improved. Muschenetz, an MIT trained Business Strategy Consultant, used Microsoft PowerPoint™ software to create several of the ‘pointed’ poems about ‘power’ dynamics in this collection.

ADVANCE PRAISE: 

Power Point astonishes me. In this short collection, Jane Muschenetz calls the U.S. to account for injustices against women and girls, quite literally keeping count by transforming graphs with footnotes into poetic forms. Her ability to write about such heavy topics as maternal mortality, racism, rape culture, and gun violence while still offering us humor, beauty, and hope for the future is masterful. If you ever need to prove to someone that poetry is still alive and powerful, you can hand them this chapbook.

–Katie Manning, Editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review, author of Hereverent and Tasty Other

It takes a certain kind of passion to write great didactic poetry. Lucretius had it, and so does Jane Muschenetz. She is a knower and her devotion to the precise, the measurable, has made the unmeasurable madness of the world all the more painful. Muschenetz also retains the deep humor and irony of her earlier work. (My favorite line may well be “…Does anyone miss Borscht, really?”)  In Power Point, there are no distinctions between the scientific, the personal, the political, and the ecstatic. Muschenetz’s love for what our world is and can/should become permeates each poem. In “Pink Noise,” she exclaims, perfectly and triumphantly: “Oh, Science! / How you pretend to not be poetry, yet / speak in silent prayers.”

–George Franklin, Recipient of the 2023 W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize and author of Remote Cities and
Conversaciones sobre agua/Conversations About Water, in collaboration with Ximena Gómez

We need these poems! In Power Point, Jane Muschenetz presents readers with a brand new poetic form of her own creation—“data poems.” The innovative, business-like style underscores the feminine rage seething just below the surface of these pieces. Muschenetz pulls no punches here and the very first poem is a gut punch, a necessary one. Commingling with righteous anger in this collection is hope. “Imagine—/ none of us powerless.” Her chosen form has a decided function, a pointed powerful one.  

–Elizabeth MacDuffie, editor-in-chief of Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, winner Best Magazine in the Annual New England Book Show