South Jersey Sand: A Memoir in Poetry

Published by Kelsay Books January 9, 2026 Buy here

I am thrilled to announce the publication of this book, my first full collection. It contains more than fifty poems that tell the background of my life in New Jersey, and occasionally wrestle with my anger at the rampant development and habitat destruction in the familiar rural places I called home. These poems struggle with religion, physical abuse, difficult relationships, death, and loss, as well as the ambiguity of coming home again.

The book is available from the publisher Kelsay Books, on Amazon, or from me directly. Cost is $25 including postage.

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Brian Evans-Jones says

“Dig deeper,” says Jean Feldeisen, and in this book she does exactly that, excavating the sands around her South Jersey roots to find a writing of richness and capacity. With meticulous attention to both the forms of poetry and the truths of feeling, she gives us an archaeology of family history, intense gleams of childhood, shards of love and parenting, and a trove of wrenching but cathartic loss and elegy. Readers will leave the book knowing that they’ve held a precious vessel, overflowing with life. 

            Brian Evans-Jones, former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the     Maureen Egan Award from Poets & Writers

When you drive, the road goes under the car and comes out the back. Jean Anne Feldeisen’s collection takes the reader on an unexpected journey to the South Jersey shore. As the author sorts through the prickly and priceless lives of the Downers, the reader is swept into the “urgent grip of the familiar,” and soon crisscrosses his own life, wondering, what is my story, and who will need that story?

            Beth Fox, widely published poet living in New Hampshire. Author of Reaching     for the Nightingale (Finishing Line Press, 2024)

With poems as smooth as sand-grains slipping through the funnel of an hourglass, Jean Anne Feldeisen’s South Jersey Sand is a poignant exhumation of familial memories seen through a lens that is at once tender, gritty, and unabashedly brave.

            Lauren WB Vermette, 14th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH; Author of “And The Form Falls Away” (Bee Monk Press, 2018)