By Kate Stockrahm
To a room filled with friends, family, supporters – and one loud espresso machine – in mid-April, Jan Worth bared her soul.
That sunny afternoon, Worth, an essayist, retired University of Michigan-Flint writing instructor, and former East Village Magazine editor, described her new poetry collection, “Elegies From the Last Days of the Empire,” as “a combination of lamentation and celebration” to an audience perched atop Totem Bookstore’s hodgepodge of wingback chairs and well-worn sofas.
“So I hope that as you hear these poems today, you will hear both things,” Worth said before beginning her reading. “And you will hear the possibility of healing or accepting the world that we’re in today.”
The poetry collection, Worth’s first to be published, spans decades of the author-cum-poet’s life – both in subject matter and actual date of writing.
She included poems she penned “in the late 80s or early 90s” on up through events of recent Flint summers, each one a vignette of her own, deeply human experiences.
Throughout the collection, Worth describes, as promised, scenes of lament, outrage, and sadness, but not without self-awareness, beauty, and even a bit of humor – sometimes all in a single poem. For instance, in a portion of “Sparrows in the Hedges,” she shares:
While the rot of tyrants
Spreads over every thing,
daily life still bangs at the door:
city trucks sucking up dust,
slugs in the marigolds,
my body twanging anxiety, needled like
acupuncture gone wrong.
And oh yeah, the meaning of life, my life
giant bulldozer between me and
tranquility, barging in.This really isn’t like me.
This really is me now.
All winter I considered
going crazy to get it over with,
played crazy and believed it.
The “crazy” stanza got a chuckle from her April afternoon audience, a mix of gray-haired heads and 30 to 40 somethings, as she continued to recite the rest of the poem.
Listeners glanced around at each other as Worth went on – perhaps in solidarity with each other in this shared secret, or as if to offer back to the poet: “Oh, we’ve all been there.”
And “Elegies” gives its reader plenty of these moments, distilled looks at life’s promises, yearnings, disappointments, small triumphs, and delights. Like in “Cling Peaches,” in which Worth breathlessly, joyfully describes a recent memory of eating a small bowl of the syrupy fruit in two long sentences, encouraging her remembering-self not to feel too guilty for already wanting more.
In a separate interview with EVM, Worth opened up about putting her heart out on display in the collection’s pages.
She spoke of the idealism she grew up on, of her privilege and optimism as she joined the Peace Corps and found love, and place, and poetry, and where she’s found herself today in her mid-70s.
“Now I’m tired,” she said, adding that her husband has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, as she explained her intent behind titling the collection “Elegies From the Last Days of an Empire.”
“It just feels like, what does this all mean?” Worth said. “It’s about loss and grief, and then you have to figure out what’s left.”
What’s left, it seems, is both universal and deeply personal. It merits examining through Worth’s lens, which somehow manages to reach outward to her readers while remaining rawly introspective.
But it’s not all grief and gloom.
Even in its seriousness Worth’s poetry offers readers respite – like in “We Never Thought We Would End Up Like This,” when she describes a time, over crepes, that she and her friend realized that they both were taking Xanax.
While “Elegies” spans decades of experiences and more than 50 pages, Worth saved one of its most representative poems for the collection’s last.
In “Requiem: I Fall While Dancing” the reader follows as Worth tumbles “to the potholed ground” after one risky dance move too many at an outdoor concert.
Her last stanza is the outcome of that evening, but perhaps also a summary of the collection itself and a commentary on the richness of life that she, and all of us, can still appreciate – even in waning health and trying times – so long as we keep a mirthful perspective on what’s lost along the way:
But I don’t care and I’m still sort of dancing except lost in the dirt,
and a tangle of arms, white and black, gets me upright and then
I’m embarrassed and I remember I’m old
and somebody hands me my cap and I rear up wobbly but
swinging my hips and wailing into all the grief and
I go on dancing, my body unchastened and
mad and unspent, until the song ends and my thermos of gin is dry
and it’s almost dark and I go home bruised to restless sleep
dreaming lamentations for the millions dead.
Jan Worth’s “Elegies From the Last Days of the Empire” is published by Kelsay Books.
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in East Village Magazine’s May 2026 issue.
