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3 books match the query 'Wells, Jonathan'
Debris
Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books, 2021
In Debris Jonathan Wells is concerned by the tension between the internal world of the lyric and an external world of violence and intrusion. Following this conflict through poems of rumination, imagination and increasing threat, the book resolves in a eulogy that is simple and touching. In one of the opening poems, “Notes from the Invasion”, the speaker asserts, “The worst has happened. There is nothing/to imagine,”. The collection as a whole asks us to consider the questions: without imagination, what is left of the poem and the mind in a time of catastrophe? How are we to find peace? Experience love? Wells invites us to join him in the lyric’s journey, to shelter in reading, and to travel in the imagination in order to protect the self from danger and risk without denial.
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The Man With Many Pens
Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books, 2015
The Man with Many Pens is about love—“a love that smells so much like blood”—and song—“a song that the oak leaves will not finish.” These poems examine how a single love or a single song contains multiple personalities and contradictory forces, tensions, and concordances.
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Train Dance
Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books, 2011
Train Dance adopts the rhythm and return of the commute through the Hudson Valley into Manhattan as a motif for the echoes of memory and event that contour a life. Reflecting on the place of poetry amid the urban hustle—a way one might “Carry myself like a tune/ Into the chorus of the city”—Wells records a series of linked journeys in which a son comes to understands his mother’s death and writing engraves events in memory, retaining events as locations—station stops, as it were—to which one returns.
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