Into the Ancient by Joseph M. Hess

$22.99

 

In Hess’s Into the Ancient, a book that leaps centuries, landscapes, and modes of telling, the poet draws our attention most vividly to our essential loneliness. The ongoing historical traumas—personal and public—that inform these cinematic poems are rendered without sentiment. They do not comfort but speak their truth.

–Kathy Fagan, Kingsley Tufts finalist and author of Bad Hobby

 

Sharp, self-lacerating, and elegant, Into the Ancient crosses several continents while digging into memories: ex-lovers, a tragically lost brother. In Joe Hess’s exacting mirror, a troubling American style of loving, fogged-over and obscure against a late Cold War backdrop, starts to come clear.

–Cathy Wagner, author of Of Course. New York: Fence Books, 2020, Nervous Device. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2012, My New Job. New York: Fence Books, 2009, Macular Hole. New York: Fence Books, 2004, and Miss America. New York: Fence Books, 2001.

 

 

 

 

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Description

Into the Ancient

by Joseph M. Hess

Full-length, Paper

List: $22.99

979-8-88838-494-7

2024

Into the Ancient presents America as a post-patriarchal empire rife with entangled narratives erupting outside its conventional dying metaphors: collages of nostalgia entangled with post-modern decollage (Borrowed Browns), the future of our natural world trapped inside a Devil’s sexy endgame (Curve Wind), a pornography adjacent to love and loss (Flesh Cartography, Splendor) billboarded super models above Jehovah Witnesses (Low Ghosts in Brooklyn). The poems also present the quotidian turning provocative: a soldier’s longing wandering a convenient store (parallax), one’s individual agency wrestling with classical, gendered mythologies (Pandora and Orpheus, Spotting Odysseus). The poems wades in a textured poetics of allusion, imagery and metaphor, in an effort to decipher the ever-evolving, or mutating field of contact between enduring consciousness and fleeting awareness, between overly-normative cultural expectations and personal revelation. The poems invariably twist away from traditional storylines to convey ideas strategically working out-of-synch, or contrapuntally, to bring the reader toward a lucid, emotive complexity.

Joe Hess is from Columbus, Ohio and received his MA from Miami University and MFA from Ashland University. You can find his work in The Ekphrastic Review, Into the Void, Lime Hawk, Postcard Poems and Prose, Helen Literary Magazine, Fourth and Sycamore, and a 2017 anthology from Shabda Press entitled Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands. His chapbook, Trauma Décor, was released in January 2022.

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