#jesse nathan

[kitchen-light]

What does it mean for poetry to feel like—to be experienced as—intimate talk, as if you’re hearing from an old and trusted friend? I mean the kind of talk so many of us, introverted or otherwise, crave. What does that kind of poetry look like, sound like?

Jesse Nathan, in the introduction to “Short Conversations With Poets | Morgan Parker” by Jesse Nathan, published in McSweeney’s, February 1, 2022

[2026words]

January 31, by Jesse Nathan

[noleavestoblow]

It’s so far back in time. The critics say “we have no reason to believe he in any sense ever reached home.”

-Jesse Nathan

[noleavestoblow]

Woke to a wind that rose full of birdcall dropping it fresh as if drawn from a well. … Love, I woke to the wind that rose up full of birds and for a second didn’t know my name. Woke with a tickle of panic, haunted but not sure why.

-Jesse Nathan

[scripta-manent]

The cover art for the two chaps my little press Dikembe is releasing next week, Land by Julie Kantor and Cloud 9 by Jesse Nathan. Both by artist-extraordinaire Ian Huebert.    

http://www.dikembepress.com/

[3rdspeak]

Eye by Jesse Nathan

Voice low, father, you are hurting aloud from the book of your life on this earth.

You are tearing out verses, pages, reciting histories of mountains, waving

like oceans, gritting down teeth at the sound of a needle as it enters your eye.

The telephone, father, you heard its call, you blinked in red pajamas. You groped for the nightstand. Knocked

things over. I’ve read your sunken chest. Halfway to death is blindness. And fingertips,

shin bruises, and if your hands broke, father, you could not stroke your wife’s hair nor mouth

and neither could a son’s beard fill your palms. Psalm is an open, burning text

but please, dip only your thumbs in twilight. Talk not of God’s white furnace, father, and the fires

we are left in. Don’t tell a tale of a man erased

like scuff on a window.

[artfoodmusic]

Great poems are prisms, fracturing and throwing on beam of light everywhere.

from "Recitation, Imitation, Stillness," by Jesse Nathan in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry