Finding Poetry in Being Enough: A Review of Good Job by Jessica Farquhar
Good Job is poet Jessica Farquhar’s debut full-length collection. Published by Finishing Line Press in 2026, it’s an introspective and self-deprecating work, rendered with a conversational voice and dry wit. With this book, Farquhar reaches for something both ambitious and necessary, giving a voice to the experience of the middle-class American woman. The writer probes the everyday experiences of domestic life for meaning and poetics; the collection’s best poems prove she’s very capable of accomplishing this complicated task.
Farquhar is the author Dear Motorcycle Enthusiast, a chapbook published by The Magnificent Field in 2020. Her recent work appears in En*trance Journal, Autocorrect, Laurel Review, Louisville Review, Red Branch Review, Sarabande’s Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology, and You Blew It: A Miracle Monocle Micro-anthology. A recipient of grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she holds an MFA from Purdue University, where she served as assistant director of the Creative Writing program. She is a founding member of the Sublimity City poetry collective based in Louisville, Kentucky.
By glossing a few of my favorites in the collection, I hope to illustrate my sense of the writer’s project. “Weaning,” for example, was one of the standout pieces for me: “For pain relief, make a bra salad: / Soften fresh green cabbage / leaves by rolling them.” The writer’s use of practical directions (and her step away from the conversational tone that dominates the collection in favor of formal experiment) worked really well for me. The imagery became much more surprising and uncanny when settled amidst the tension between the productivity of breastfeeding and the emotional experience of the mother.
There is also the poem “On the Occasion of a Birthday,” which is perhaps the best showcase for Farquhar’s humor. She’s a genuinely funny poet, and this piece has a lot of absurdity throughout: “the bottle of champagne I picked up on / my way home, mid-contraction explaining to / the clerk I am going to have this baby in a few / hours. In the dim light of my bedroom.” The moments leading up a child’s birth are all rendered in a dead-pan tone. In her handling of humor, she reminds me of the work of Natalie Shapero. This poem is where Farquhar’s relatable and conversational voice is most controlled and achieves something surprising—and a little unsettling.
The last poem I really want to shout-out is “Twenty-Five-Thousand Dollar Pyramid.” For me, this is the most rewarding poem to reread and dissect: “Peppercorns, your partner’s pelvis, molars? / Iliad battles and idiot ballads?” The poem also features one of the most interesting formal choices in the collection. The poem is structured like a jeopardy-style questionnaire, but the questions are all a little off. I found myself going through them one-by-one and trying to find the answers, but even on a first read, the poem registers as an overwhelming spiral. In other words, the form of the poem performs the meaning of the content; it’s a very well-crafted piece.
The poems I’ve discussed reflect a poet genuinely exploring and building toward the realization of a distinctive body of work; however, I didn’t always find the collection to be consistent. There were some poems throughout that felt a bit safe and overly comfortable. And Farquhar never steps very far away from writing relatable, accessible poetry. This is a modality that works, of course, and yet there are a few missed opportunities where the poems could reach for something strange or complicate the subject matter.
In some moments, Farquhar’s casual language can feel more like processing than transformation; however, when she does something formally different with tone, image, address, or form, her strengths really show. Good Job is a solid debut and Farquhar is a skilled poet with a distinctive yet marketable voice. The poems here point toward an interesting career, especially if Farquhar keeps experimenting with formal play.
Good Job is published by Finishing Line Press based out of Georgetown, Kentucky.