Böcker av Jonas Zdanys

This latest book by Jonas Zdanys continues his multi-volume exploration of some potentials of the lyrical-narrative voice in poetry. This volume probes the epiphanic moments revealed by the lyrical voice and the human stories celebrated by the narrative impulse, both within and surrounding moments of immediate insight. The poems in this collection reflect those dual patterns, often taking the reader beyond set expectations and moving to more chaotic frameworks made possible by surrealist and magical realist perspectives. In doing so, Zdanys continues to present the world as an unbound frame where all things can be imagined and where human experience is not limited merely to the familiar. That has been an organizing thematic principle of several of his earlier books. It finds particular reaffirmation in this volume, which speaks through vivid imagery and textured language to present the contours of the immediate world lit by the poetic imagination and what it may mean to be human in it. "Zdanys is as close to consistently revealing luminosity as anyone." World Literature Today

This latest book by Jonas Zdanys presents lyrical narrative poems that speak through vivid multi-sensual imagery and the textured language of a master poet to present a resonant interplay of poetry and painting. Written in the galleries of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the poems in this volume are not just commentaries on the framed works in those galleries. They are, most essentially, expressions of the poet's commitment to hear and to extend the stories those paintings tell, and to do so by creating parallel texts in these pages -- paintings in words that absorb and expand the paintings in pigments. This book is a masterful example of ekphrasis at its best -- a mature aesthetic vision, a chronicle of what the poet has seen and imagined at the Museum, presented through varied perspectives and voices.