“Sleeping with Ghosts, the deeply personal new collection of Jen Payne’s work, is introduced with a poem about Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery in which the seams are decorated with lacquer mixed with gold or silver dust. As Payne explains in a note, the point is to honor the history of an object rather than to disguise its scars. In the poem, as in the entire collection, we are invited to examine, to touch, and to feel the gold-etched evidence of the poet’s own richly lived experience. Beautifully crafted and luminous, these poems take the reader on an intimate and unforgettable journey of love found and lost, the joys of creativity, and the power of memory.”

“What I love most about Sleeping with Ghosts is how it leaves room for each of us to find our own story within its pages. These poems don’t just tell Jen’s story—they remind us to revisit our own past, to honor our own scars, and maybe to find a bit of poetry there, too. Whether you’re someone who loves looking back with nostalgia or you’re more of a “move forward” type, there’s something here that speaks to the heart. If you’re ready to take a thoughtful, heartfelt stroll through memory and meaning, Sleeping with Ghosts is absolutely worth your time. Jen’s gentle but honest voice will stay with you long after the last page is turned.”

“Sleeping with Ghosts is not an ordinary ghost tale. Jen Payne’s combination of transparency and opaqueness teases the reader with sometimes wistful, other times gnawing, reflections on encounters with lovers and soulmates. Beautifully written with her captivating twist and cadence of words and endings, Jen’s latest collection of writings is a poignant meditation on a life of love confronted.”

“The poems in Jen Payne’s Sleeping with Ghosts deal with all manner of the circumstances of love and its loss. It could be a sad book. But, as you might infer from the title, this poet is gifted with a sense of irony, catalogues the ghosts of relationships lost which visit her still with hard-earned honesty bereft of self-pity, wonderful imagery and, somehow, a lightness of touch. She describes with deft strokes more than her share of visiting ghosts. But she allows them their charms where deserved, and we are happy to travel the long- and near-past with her as she sheds one interesting character after another. We find ourselves not just admiring but also delighting in her as she moves through good times and hard with a poet’s kind of vision and language and a perspective equal parts wise and whimsical.”