Praise for Hyena 

From Ruth Stone

“This book is a revolution. It is to poetry what the concept of the Klein bottle is to the three-dimensional world—the simultaneous connection, inside and outside of physical and emotional experience. Every poem in Hyena is unique. You see, taste, feel, and remember every sensual detail. With daring and powerful language, Jan Freeman breaks the barriers of learned responses, opening walls of consciousness. These are poems of great tenderness, violence, and sensual beauty. They are lyrical, hypnotic. You don’t forget them. Hyena is a ground-breaking work. This is poetry of genius.”

From David Shapiro

“Blow torch talk takes courage, and these shameless poems about shame have the accurate power. Spinoza’s marvelous insight that we do not comprehend what the body may be is here underlined by a new and ferocious sense of vital sexuality. And Freeman reminds us that we do not yet know what poetry can be, always newly born.”

From Joan Larkin

“Hyena is a wild, lush original. Jan Freeman’s extraordinary first collection aims straight at the body and unmasks its hungers, anger, and separateness. Her poems breathe the almost unbreathable air of passion, insist on the truth of denied and forbidden feelings, and rejoice in the feast.”

From Sharon Doubiago

“This is the real stuff...Erotic, beautiful, terrible, taboo, terrifying, violent images used to split the skin, these poems are whole dances, magic chants, blood-root erotic prayers incredible to hear, of the wild troubled powerful spirit caught in the body, loving and hating the body, painting the dead, the earth, the universe...‘I am out I am out I am out: I swear I am out.’ You’ll swear it too.”