Böcker av Jason Adam Sheets

The act of reading difficult texts during difficult times is the thematic element that holds these 4 authors'' poetic works together. Having met at Harvard Divinity School, Charli Pence Bond, Ethan Nosanow Levin, Abigail Grace Louisin, and Jason Adam Sheets take their deepest, most intimate connections to the truth to decipher meaning during a time of high anxiety, stress, and debilitating circumstances--the pandemic. What transpired was a creative energy where each author sought meaning through difficulty in the form of poetry--hence, this collection. What sits now before you is a reach for something brighter, truth that screams and saws, verse that transcends normality, and a collection of poetry that offers a great light to be shared with the masses. Take a deep breath. Hold these poems in. Breathe. Answers to all come in time.

In this dazzling and impressive collection, Sheets writes wonder, beauty, mystery, and awe onto what feels like a new contemporariness. Throughout the book, the poet exists as both seeker and what is sought as he examines deeply the esoteric practices that color his lens, practices such as alchemy, occultism, and Hermeticism, notably observed from a perspective of what could only be considered a dynamic poetics of being, pulsating with a linguistic tone and spirited vocabulary that serve to recall the aesthetic power of surrealism and modernism. Poems ice over and ignite in equal measure as the poet transforms image into sanctity. His declarations, often imbued with the radiant gems of a poet's personal myth-making, are equally universal in their urgency, as when he writes: We have only this much in common: we come then become keepers of things. You set fire to a wreck of dire roses and flicker like an ever-burning lamp fueled by the charm of a deeper system. This book renders a gift of fresh memory. It renews at every one of its sections the beginning of a mythologically charged human experience. If poetry has the force to activate a shift of consciousness, or mystical experience, then Sheets, who "settled effortlessly into the mantle of modern mystic" in The Hour Wasp, continues to prove with this book that he is a true poetic force.