Tarantula Season and Other Poems by DB Jonas

Addressing us in a voice at once thoroughly contemporary and curiously ancient, the poetry of Tarantula Season transports us across landscapes, cultures and art-forms bewildering in their variety but unified by the recurring themes of journeying and loss, alterity and time, and the grandeur of the natural world.  The lyrical and intellectual sophistication of these poems accomplishes the promise of all important art by reintroducing us to the luminous richness of the world while encountering the inconvenient stranger always present at the heart of the familiar.

–Alain Toumayan, The University of Notre Dame

In the tradition of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, DB Jonas has constructed a soaring architecture in verse. Though grounded in the Mountain Southwest landscape with its coachwhips, redtail hawks, and Autumn’s “winy odors of decay,” in Tarantula Season we also meet with coastal frigate birds and mountain men, step into Giacometti’s studio, find Orpheus in the underworld, read an unwritten letter from Nietzsche, visit medieval Spain, third century China and 17th century Salem, and overhear a lonely teenager whistling in the stairwell. His poetry invites us to join this “noisy empire of boundless flight.”

–Joel Van Valin, Publisher of Whistling Shade and author of The White Forest

DB Jonas wields a rare granularity of intention in the crafting of poems that effortlessly pursue narrative, visual, and sonic expression.  New rewards await the careful eye with each journey from cover to cover of Tarantula Season.  We are invited to linger in close reading yet are always carried forward by the sweep and logic of these carefully crafted verses.

–Christopher Fields, Editor of Neologism Poetry Journal

In this stunning first collection of poetry, DB Jonas takes the reader on a multisensory journey into the unknown. Diverse folkloric and cultural inspirations, a foundation of scientific rigour, and a resolute materialism expressed in paradoxically spiritual language, are deftly woven into a holistic view of the world that offers readers a generous and bountiful way in which we all might hope to live.

–Sam Illingworth, Edinburgh Napier University, Founding Editor of Consilience Poetry Journal

Tarantula Season introduces us to a thickly populated world of literature, philosophy, art, and questions of belief, all beautifully distilled into lyrical meditations and memorable lyrics such as “Angel,” “Sens unique,” “Augenblick” and the collection’s title poem. Steeped in the European intellectual tradition, taking inspiration from broadly diverse cultural sources, DB Jonas remains firmly rooted in rugged American landscapes, always leaving his readers with a redemptive sense of “the slow heat / of living.”

–Kevin Hart, The University of Virginia, author of Lands of Likeness