Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they're instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic.
From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like 'Good Mother Morning Family Happy,' 'Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,' and 'Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,' Delisle's ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography's clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.
"Bowering Delisle's response to the power of stock is to do everything she can in her poetry to undermine it. [She] has a knack for innovation and comedy, so it never feels as though she is belaboring her central metaphor." – David Starkey, California Review of Books,The Best Poetry of 2025
"Stock is a timely reflection on media, representation, and the aesthetics of contemporary life." – Jami Macarty, New Pages
"Stock's ekphrastic poems riff on the portrayal of the ideal woman in art and in life; they interrogate the bizarre possibility of finding one's own identity commercialized and attached to indiscriminate advertisements out in the world. Couched in the language of stock photo identifiers, these brilliant poems peel back layers of identity to excavate, from beneath computer-generated images, stories of mothers and daughters – women who have been denied individual agency. Playful, bizarre, eviscerating, and deeply empathetic, these are poems precisely attuned to what we stand to lose when we can no longer, in our advertisements, actually perceive ourselves." – Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees
"In stock photography, we're left alone with our supposed goals in a sanitized aspirational narrative of our lives. We don't even recognize our own smile: our teeth have become uncanny in a world built by the treachery of images. And, as Jennifer Bowering Delisle puts it: 'Sometimes nothing/ is so lonely as joy.' Her poetry is an incisive investigation of the tropes of our culture and the self and how it beguiles and seduces us with the strange beauty of media. Stock is smart poetry that smarts and yet delights with invention and insight." – Gary Barwin
"The stark and equally rich reflective poems in Stock ask questions about the way we see and disguise ourselves, or more accurately, the way society asks women to see and disguise themselves. Delisle deftly shifts the idea of using Key Words to reproduce the images of human nature into pieces that reflect the foreignness of such a disassociated way of browsing through humanity. This is a collection that blows the words from my palm toward the screen and calls on us to listen … deeply." – Rayanne Haines, author of Tell the Birds Your Body is Not a Gun
Praise for Deriving:
Deriving is a masterfully crafted collection that is both prescient and relevant. Delisle traverses time, language, geography, and topography and deftly synthesizes the ethereal and the concrete with poems that 'sound the shape of a thousand leaves.' Delisle's lens zooms in and out from the internal workings of motherhood, family, and love, even as it brings into focus etymology, biology, climate change, and politics. Above all, this collection is a magical exploration of language's perfection and elusiveness. Here is a voice that enlightens, surprises, and stirs. Deriving is rich―its breadth and depth compel the reader to experience poetry that, at its core, is about 'finding words/for everything I'll never understand.'" – Wendy McGrath, author of Recurring Fictions
