Böcker av Jed Myers

In Jed Myers' Learning to Hold, we are invited to consider war, genocide, and ...small moments of gratitude.-Martha Silano, author of Reckless Lovely

The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift explores the invisible dynamic by which we and the rest of life tend to persist through the perennial threats, hardships, oppressions, and traumas that would, and eventually do, take us down. The poet's own family's immigrant refugee history is both resource and backdrop for such illuminations. These poems draw as well on childhood memories, observations of nature in its cycles of emergence and breakdown, experiences of love, present-day social struggle, and the all-too-current realities of barbarous invasion and warfare. The collection's title phrase and central image is found in its penultimate poem, "A Prayer," in which we witness a creature's exquisitely embodied knowing of how to navigate the forces of the surround. These poems suggest that the "lift" is indeed in the intimate attunement, a kind of communion, with what surrounds us, immediately and at any distance.

"These poems find the strange and beautiful in everyday moments: visiting adeli, flying on a plane, sitting on the back steps, noticing a stray cottonwoodtuft, recalling a walk with a child now grown. In this poet's gaze, each elementof the quotidian becomes particular, luminous, and finally, universal. Thiseffect comes from fresh and powerful imagery; from surprising diction,uniquely-apt words used in new ways, as in 'each of us / hung out to die, awish out of water.' The poems move with a freedom born of familiarity withmeter and rhyme, and the lines reverberate with subtle music."-Rebecca Foust, Marin County Poet Laureate andauthor of Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry"The Marriage of Space and Time is more often than not local in its concerns,even intimate. Such is the nature of this particular marriage, in which we alllive. And die. This ongoing here and now. Also then. 'Our sorrows meet in oneshadow,' he writes; later on, he concludes, 'I'm old. I'm coming to life.' Myersaims to see as closely and accurately as he can, and in his seeing, he gives hisreaders a way to see as well, and thus to be genuinely alive, in our own timeand space, for as long as we have it."-Robert Wrigley, author of Box andThe Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems