Review by Jami Macarty
Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s latest poetry collection, Stock, uses search engines and stock photographs as prompts to craft persona, erasure, found, and list poems that critique the staged, clichéd narratives embedded in corporate and domestic imagery. Through a conceptual approach and an “engineered” engagement, the poet seeks to expose the manipulative and biased undercurrents of stock images.
The collection is divided into five sections, addressing themes surrounding motherhood, family, holidays, job searches, and the corporate world. Delisle’s focus on the “composition” of images, searches, and poems drives the collection’s central critique. By using search-engine language to construct poems, she highlights how supposedly neutral visual and textual data are shaped by preconceived narratives. “[Search]” poems such as “Writer” and “Craft” are most revealing, offering glimpses of the poet behind the mask and reinforcing the book’s argument about authenticity’s difficulty amid digital artifice. Most poems inhabit invented personae — especially women in domestic or corporate roles — demonstrating how voices are “encumbered” by superficiality, cliché, and external judgment. At times, the use of persona risks insensitivity, potentially perpetuating the very objectification and reduction it seeks to expose. As the poet writes: “Just who is it / you mean to save?”
Describing these poems as ekphrastic reveals another tension in the project’s logic. Critiquing stock images by elevating them to art draws attention to the complexities and gambles of such an approach. The poems consistently hold up a mirror to societal conventions and ills. However, the absence of alternatives or solutions leaves the impact of this critique in question — does it provoke change, foster awareness, or risk reinforcing issues it seeks to highlight?
Though rich in sociopolitical commentary — particularly on gender roles — the writing sometimes lacks the emotional sympathy that might complicate its critique. Addressing what critique achieves or fails to achieve could deepen the collection’s exploration of artistic responsibility and engagement with the systems it interrogates. Still, Stock is a timely reflection on media, representation, and the aesthetics of contemporary life.
Stock by Jennifer Bowering Delisle. Coach House Books, September 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award. To learn more about Macarty’s writing, editing, and teaching, visit her author website.
