Summary and Reviews of A Night Without Armor by Jewel Kilcher

A Night Without Armor by Jewel Kilcher

A Night Without Armor

by Jewel Kilcher
  • Critics' Consensus (3):
  • Readers' Rating (15):
  • First Published:
  • May 1, 1998, 160 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 1999, 160 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

In A Night Without Armor, her first collection of poetry, Jewel explores the fire of first love, the fading of passion, the giving of trust, the lessons of betrayal, and the healing of intimacy.

I've learned that not all poetry lends itself to music -- some thoughts need to be sung only against the silence. There are softer and less tangible part[s] of our selves that are so essential to peace, to openheartedness, to unfolding the vision and the spiritual realm of our lives, to exposing our souls. - Jewel, From the Preface.

Writing poems and keeping journals since childhood, Jewel has been searching for truth and meaning, turning to her words to record, to discover, and to reflect.

In A Night Without Armor, her first collection of poetry, Jewel explores the fire of first love, the fading of passion, the giving of trust, the lessons of betrayal, and the healing of intimacy.

She delves into matters of the home, the comfort of family, the beauty of Alaska, and the dislocation of divorce.

And then there are the images of the road, the people, the bars, the planes, places exotic and mundane, loneliness and friendship.

Frank and honest, serious and suddenly playful, A Night Without Armor is a talented artist's intimate portrait of what makes us uniquely human.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Entertainment Weekly - Andrew Essex
[H]er best poems, raw autobiographical sketches that chronicle her Alaskan upbringing, hint that Jewel is just a polish away from shining.

The New York Observer - James Hunter
Jewel has a fairly scary way to save our souls: not memoir or fiction or even poetic effects smuggled into records or movies or whatever, but poetry - its big, bad super bizarre self, stuff written in lines, stuff that reduces beastie boys and cool chicks everywhere to states of literary terror.

Library Journal
For people who don't regularly follow MTV (which unfortunately includes most of those who listen to poetry), Jewel will seem to have sprung up out of nowhere. But the 23-year-old Alaska native has four albums to her credit and several web sites. ...Sure, there are too many prepositions and some cliched images; an attempt to be philosophical is laughable; and many "poems" are nothing more than fragments. But a lot of the material is also straightforward and deeply honest...Certainly, she's as good as Leonard Cohen and deserves serious attention from poetry lovers.

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