The poems in Shannon Tate Jonas’ The Rake slip between life and death with such ease that I cannot help but stop and listen. It’s as if the routine, the mundane, and the quotidian are the coals in the fire we’re sitting around, and each line of these poems is the terrifying possibility of nature calling out from the woods around us. The easy choice is to stay where we are, but these stunning poems urge us to step away from those moments and find out what’s waiting for us just beyond the reach of the light.
These stunning poems urge us to step away from…the terrifying possibility of nature calling out from the woods. . . find out what’s waiting for us just beyond the reach of the light. -- Adam Clay, author of To Make Room from the Sea (Milweed: 2020).
The poems in Shannon Tate Jonas’ The Rake slip between life and death with such ease that I cannot help but stop and listen. It’s as if the routine, the mundane, and the quotidian are the coals in the fire we’re sitting around, and each line of these poems is the terrifying possibility of nature calling out from the woods around us. The easy choice is to stay where we are, but these stunning poems urge us to step away from those moments and find out what’s waiting for us just beyond the reach of the light.
These stunning poems urge us to step away from…the terrifying possibility of nature calling out from the woods. . . find out what’s waiting for us just beyond the reach of the light. -- Adam Clay, author of To Make Room from the Sea (Milweed: 2020).
The poems in Shannon Tate Jonas’ The Rake slip between life and death with such ease that I cannot help but stop and listen. It’s as if the routine, the mundane, and the quotidian are the coals in the fire we’re sitting around, and each line of these poems is the terrifying possibility of nature calling out from the woods around us. The easy choice is to stay where we are, but these stunning poems urge us to step away from those moments and find out what’s waiting for us just beyond the reach of the light.
These stunning poems urge us to step away from…the terrifying possibility of nature calling out from the woods. . . find out what’s waiting for us just beyond the reach of the light. -- Adam Clay, author of To Make Room from the Sea (Milweed: 2020).
Shannon Jonas offers up to us a sacrifice of the slaughtered ruins of his own ancient innocence. The poems in The Rake stopped dripping with blood a long time ago and have been honed by the elements to sing with the sharpness of a wind cave made of bones. Unwilling to give up on the lyric, Romanticism, or the ancestors of poetry, The Rake is a continual encounter with the past, with innumerable pasts, like Borges’ futures, a flux of labyrinths transposed upon the ever-present moment of the visionary watching and seeking “to be something alone & outside of what surrounds us.” Stripped of artifice, unapologetically willing to turn to the archaic to realize the present, almost unnoticeably skillful in turns of line and word play, these poems step beyond the static-y echo chambers of the technology age in which “words I learned unmade me” to commune with the remnants of nature in order to be remade as we once were, innocent as the un-mythologized origins of humanity, or, as Jonas puts it, “I can explain it this way, un-beautifully. —Matthew Henriksen
"I can't / go back, but I may return" says Shannon Jonas, of a hometown about to be buried under a lake, and in many ways, this is a poetry of return, to a loved rural landscape, blue mountains, the New River, nine crows that "yonder rouse & spread outward." More crucially, it is a deeply inward poetry reckoning intricately with memory and loss, as well as the vital mystery of the (short-)lived moment. Or as Jonas beautifully puts it, "I open the windows & mind / the whispers & breathing I hear outside." -- Nancy Eimers author of Oz and A Grammar to Waking
