Everyone Disappears by W. Luther Jett

Clocks are a constant reminder that time is always disappearing. Jett’s collection of poems is a meditation on impermanence. Death is a theme one will slow dance with when reading this book. Jett knows there are days when one’s hands are empty, holding not even the warmth of the blues. The people we love have gone ahead. Soon they disappear from our sight. Jett writes so that we might continue to see.

–Ethelbert Miller, Writer and literary activist, Host of On The Margin (WPFW 89.3 FM)

In W. Luther Jett’s Everyone Disappears never have the dead been more alive. It’s his “feel of flowers,” wild deer running in green hills, “the sky not a wall but a gate,” and more. The theme is loss; yet, the spirited act of writing transforms everything created by nature, even its demise. Poems like these expand the canon; mortality has always been a job for the poet and Jett doesn’t turn away, modulating poems with colorful words and powerful insights so the subject   —precise in every note — endows pain with beauty. This poetry revolves around family, with feelings tender and vulnerable — allowing more opportunity for music-making. Subtle and intelligent stories, realized through the power of Jett’s voice, make life appear on every page.

–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

“Everyone goes away. Everyone disappears”, Luther Jett declares in these haunting odes to the ending of people and things, vanishing into memory, then out of it. But we, his readers, are here still, treasuring Jett’s lyrics, his gentle ironies, and his dark yet charming humor: The grandfather clock that “would move through our rooms when it thought we were all asleep.” These poems appear at a time when we we are living (and dying) through a waking nightmare, a pandemic devouring humans, cultures, ways of life. What rough beast is rising out of the ashes? Jett, the bard, the seer, gives us clues to help us reconstruct our lives and the memories of our dead. We will be reciting Luther Jett‘s poems many years hence, into the uncertain dark.

–Indran Amirthanayagam, author of The Migrant States, editor of Beltway Poetry Journal