American Lit by Jacob Minasian
$14.99
I can’t think of a recent book of poems that has come from the midwest that feels more necessary to me than Jacob Minasian‘s American Lit These poems have a quiet, bold, determined, confident intelligence, and a startling directness. They are the record of a person trying to make sense of the coasts where he has lived and traveled, and of his current home, the land of the Meijer superstore, of pastures and freeways and Ohio’s “metal wasteland … like some brutal aftermath.” After reading American Lit, I felt like I understood, or perhaps more important, had the opportunity to feel, at least part of the landscape and mood and politically charged and socially ambiguous and ambivalent spirit of the middle of the country. I am immensely grateful for this book, and for this essential new voice in American poetry.
–Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry and Father’s Day
The poems in Jacob Minasian‘s American Lit attentively survey our current iteration of absurdity and desperation, when “all the good monsters have failed us” or continue to fail us, our environment, and our own common interests. And so we continue, underpaid, “trying to avoid/ the news, because /things are happening.” Minasian’s poems are real, rooted in ordinary experience, with everything that entails—they are angry, sad, and beautiful, and contain a resilience and belief that, amongst it all, “Periodically things/ are pierced by art.”
–Brett Fletcher Lauer, author of A Hotel in Belgium
Description
American Lit
by Jacob Minasian
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-123-1
2020
Jacob Minasian received his MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California, where he was the 2016 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize winner. His work has appeared in publications including Poets.org, Museum of Americana, RipRap Literary Journal, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California by Scarlett Tanager Books. Originally from California, he currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he teaches at Cincinnati State.
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