Jane Mead is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016) which was nominated for a National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Griffin Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she manages her family’s ranch in northern California. She has taught as a visiting writer at Washington University, Colby College and most recently, The University of Iowa. She passed away in September of 2019.

“[In Money Money Money | Water Water Water] Jane Mead’s assured hand has snipped exquisite holes in her poems, allowing the unsaid to rise, waver and haunt every line. . . [Mead] has removed every non-essential word, a mastery of distillation, to create a work of pure potency.”
—The Conium Review

“I have not read, in a long time, a book of poems so unswervingly eloquent, so filled with sorrow and beauty, so powerfully connected to nature and advocacy for a dying earth as Jane Mead’s new collection [Money Money Money | Water Water Water].”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Jane Mead’s mission is to rescue—to search and rescue; and the mind, above all, does the work. She says—twice—in one poem that “the mind gives over its small grave of secrets.” She is searching for the “sentence written in stone—far enough back so the water can’t get it.” Her poems are a beautiful search for liberation and rebirth. I praise them to the sky.”
—Gerald Stern

“Money Money Money | Water Water Water offers us both a voice and an undervoice, and the tension between them achieves a loose-limbed elegance—whatever once had to be built can now be simply uttered, trusting the words to be as eternal—or more so—than the world we pass through. I feel utterly transported in Mead’s presence, surrounded by—and imbued in—her language.”
—Nick Flynn

“Money Money Money | Water Water Water addresses not only the economic politics of water, but also the economic politics of investing in your own life. It’s costly, and this book counts the ways. It’s a book of ecopoetics in an unusually large sense—and one that contributes complexly to the genre’s commitment to the political—but it also marks a structural advance in lyric poetry. Sound here is always foregrounded, put completely at the service of a highly poised and highly intentional play of aphoristic, almost ephemeral, passages against grounded, yet open-ended, poems that build into a life—both that of a person and that of a people. It’s a beautiful, seamless book that never stops gathering force—one in which the strength, brilliance, and movement of the phrase is the ultimate ecosystem.”
—Cole Swensen

“A tough, wise, and beautiful book about the human destruction of the earth and everything trying to live here: ‘the poisoned planet poisoning.’ All this brilliant poet’s knowledge and experience have been gathered into this fierce, grieving book, laid at the feet of our global kingdom and power: ‘How much can you subtract now / How much and still get by’.”
—Jean Valentine