Prisonegg by Jonathan Pessant

In “Prisonegg” Jonathan Pessant shows us a huge arc of character. We begin with the military as a way to prove masculinity – ghosts are “pressed flat” as photos and a name’s “double-edgedness” is “compressed upon us.” “Obscene Machines” threaten to take over. Life as a prison guard begins with an extreme sense of limitation, but this confinement yields surprising intimacy — when an inmate shaves a guard with a straight razor, or a lover wakes to the soft snore of poems. Pessant is a master of “the technique of gone,” turning memory’s complexities over and over until their expansiveness opens up. In a short number of pages, manliness swerves into the night; the future gurgles, unnatural and anticipatory. “Prisonegg” is a true triumph — Pessant allows a reader to feel how life plays with us and how we play with life, how we become a father to our own selves.

–Jefferson Navicky, author of Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands