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If There’s a Place to Keep it All its Here by Jeff King

$17.99

Paper

This title will be released on May 15, 2026

This is the direct language of life. A life of hopes for a better future. The life of a younger man trying to figure out how to live as a father and husband. The life of a cook aging at the stove. The life of an artist. The trappings of the past explode in the present as though they happened moments ago because they cannot be forgotten. Above all this book of poems addresses complications in every facet and the struggle of beating oneself to death with thoughts out of control. Each poem is its own scene, and collectively they hope to express some kind of love.

Jeff King was born in Omaha, NE in 1974. Before his serious interest in writing, he was active as a visual artist in a local capacity in Omaha, exhibiting widely throughout the city. He is currently a student at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha where he studies in the creative writing program. His work was featured in Heavy Feather Review and The Metropolitan. He still lives in Omaha with his wife and two sons. Instagram—Jeff King @thewo_rdsremainthesame

PRAISE:

” Poetry is a way of working out a problem, a question, some wonder—and realizing, eventually, that we will not work everything out. Time, as King writes, is always different looking backwards. How to carry it with us? Under a title that is both resolution and confession, King’s poems chronicle time–its people, their expectations and his own–unraveling and reorganizing experience into something understandable, but for how long? “I don’t want there to be a last song,” King writes. Lucky for us, he’s just beginning.
–Lindsey Baker, writer and editor, author of This Is Bad (Gibraltar Editionsand Fine Warm Pulse (dancing girl press).
 
Jeff King‘s evocative and strenuous poetic mindscape, full and boiling but somehow not overbrimming, in which he’s also, “editing out the parts/of the day nobody can hear without listening as hard as I do,” provides delight and instruction. What to retain? What to discard? They’re our ongoing, essential, and perplexing questions. I appreciate how King hears and sees a range of unexpected responses that meld into pure synthesis…how each intriguing conclusion sets in motion a fresh and urgent beginning.”
–Steve Langan, author of, most recently, Bedtime Stories; What It looks Like, How It Fliesand Meet Me at the Happy Bar
 
“In these deft and deeply-felt poems, King contemplates the elusiveness of time-the shifting selves in the mirror; the memories that have taken on the surreal tint of a polaroid, the context of everything outside the frame just out of grasp. In the opening poem, King warns us,” There is no way to remember this life, it all falls apart into shreds of dandelions,” and yet what a landscape he’s he’s able to reconstruct with those shreds–in paint, in song and snapshot, he maps an internal landscape as vivid and tender as grief.”
–Liz Kay, author of The Witch Tells The Story And Makes It True, Monsters: A Love Story and Fallout.

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