Tangled in Motion

Tangled in Motion (2015) is Jane L. Carman's one JEF novel, and she calls what she made here "fiction + truth + p(r)o(s)etry": a hybrid of running text, prose-poetry, and lyric memoir built around love, abandonment, and the restorying of a girl who lives in the margins of an already marginalized society. Ricardo Cortez Cruz called it "rest(less) lit at its finest," a phrase that points back to the Illinois State dissertation, Rest(Less) Lit, out of which the book grew.

Carman is not only a JEF author. She sits on the JEF editorial board and judged the 2019 Kenneth Patchen Award, selecting Genelle Chaconas's Plague City. She founded Lit Fest Press, the Festival of Language reading series, and the David Foster Wallace Conference at Illinois State.

This is the book that carries her own voice rather than her editorial hand.