Cast Your Longest Shadow (Chestnut Review Chapbooks)

Cast Your Longest Shadow offers poems that chart the geography of loss—the liminal space of love unraveling. But these poems don't linger only in darkness. Through language that is both contemporary and timeless, Cast Your Longest Shadow traces the redemptive arc from grief to grace. With precision and emotional resonance, Jad Josey explores the continuum of darkness and light, of love and loss, of the shadow and the spark.

Praise for Jad Josey’s Cast Your Longest Shadow

With gut-wrenching perception, Jad Josey’s Cast Your Longest Shadow meets the ideal purpose of a chapbook: to focus the consciousness of a speaker bearing with raw honesty upon a unified subject. For a remarkably moving experience, I highly recommend that readers absorb the whole book in one sitting. In an exceptional sequence of stand-alone poems, Josey renders the existential displacement of an individual whose life has been rent by the sudden reality of lost love. Classic, universal, sharply contemporary, and formally surprising, these whip-smart, keenly imagined poems rise out of a breached mire to produce a blues verse that enthralls.

—Kevin Clark, author of The Consecrations and Self-Portrait with Expletives

“I’ve learned not to be haunted... in the between spaces” Jad Josey writes in Cast Your Longest Shadow, a book which flings itself simultaneously into lived-in images of nature and the narrator’s ever-expanding interiority. Here, every poem is a “between space” built from liminality, love, and loam, a place where feeling brushes up against the stars only to then plummet into the ocean to glide alongside an ancient shark. While it is impossible to squeeze everything into a poem, in these perfectly-crafted lines, Josey has certainly come close. “When you have / nothing left, you still have / everything you carry.”

—Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish