Location Services by Jeff Pearson

Brimming with nervy energy, these poems spotlight systems we believe to be coherent, and offer us a glimpse of what’s missing. They chart a mental health crisis through a rental history, run an elegy through google maps. The poems often begin bound—sometimes burdened—by place, but manage to transcend physical location: “Forget about drying off/with the towel from the flooded toilet.//Forget about dead relatives.// Forget all around you.// Forgive all around you.” The real service of Location Services is that Pearson navigates us toward a new understanding.

–Bethany Schultz-Hurst, author of Miss Lost Nation

From “the closest place to the middle of nowhere,” Jeff Pearson creates deeply imagined and uncommon somewheres: charting loss, breakdowns, and human connections with a vision like no one else. In a landscape ravined by deaths and charted by Google Street View, these poems and their “tones of unlikeliness” are restlessly questioning and unforgettable relocations.

–Alexandra Teague, author of The Wise and Foolish Builders, and The Mortal Geography.