Book of Never by Jonathan Duckworth

Jonathan Duckworth’s debut collection, The Book of Never, is always compelling, invariably inventive, and unfailingly unique. Between these covers you’ll have surprising encounters with Laozi and Du Fu, that “doddering synesthesiast” Nabokov and “the ghost/ of William Blake/ eating detergent/ in [a] utility closet.” And then there’s the poet-speaker himself, so attuned to nuance: he who makes us listen to “the hush/ that follows words;” he who helps us visualize the soul as that “little gray thing like a krill/ swimming in [the] belly;” he who sifts for us, with grace and skill, “particles/ of [the] inmost dark.”

–Julie Marie Wade, author of SIX and Same-Sexy Marriage

Jonathan Duckworth is a poet who knows “the naked truth of our world…must be padded in the fur/of a dark wolf.”  Jonathan, what sublime insights you have!  (“The better to understand you, my dear,” he might say.) Duckworth embraces reality and its shadows through the wisdom of omens and dreams, the Faerie Queen, Orpheus, Chinese masters, Yeats, Slavic and Algonquian folklore, creation myths, Nabokov, Van Gogh, and the spirit and science of our very own corporal bodies.  Book of Never spins narratives which sooth and alarm, which bring us to the core of our very beings.

–Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout and Scald

Jonathan Duckworth‘s poems reveal a mind delving into the mysteries that surround us and our need to fabricate, embroider, and allow language to strut her considerable wiles. He pumps gas with Nabokov, finds Willam Blake in his utility closet, and above all takes his readers on a tour through a world much larger than it was before we began to read his work. Book of Never is a glorious debut.

–Barbara Hamby, author of Delirium and On the Streets of Divine Love