Maps for Jackie

Poetry’s natural habitat is one of detail, radiant or tarnished, an intimate geography that draws us close to where presence is an act of perception: world into word. In Maps for Jackie, Jason Labbe navigates a terrain of singular encounters and incidents, tactile, luminous and animated by the sensuous abrasions and comforts of the heartmind as they touch down on his, and our, present: white leaf is like a moth / wing I’d fix to her shoulder.

—ANN LAUTERBACH

How indeed, in a fraught and decentered world, can one “map the illegible?” A world where all things oscillate between the light and the dark? Where the inner life and the outer life struggle toward reconciliation, or at least some semblance of balance? Where the subsurface of “any residential neighborhood” harbors sexual/textual tensions that threaten the very means of communication? To address, or make manifest, such questions, and their attendant passions, Labbe employs a radically expressionistic and often disjunctive language that defies our commonplace methods of observation and perception. Here the map and the territory engage in a contention that is both surprising and enlightening to witness.

—MICHAEL PALMER

Jason Labbe’s wonderfully moving and inventive collection Maps for Jackie is an open journey into desire and its fathomlessness. Though the poems dislocate between something and nothing, it’s a loving ride where “waking finds / morning the inmost warp / in space time.” The book is filled with impeccable craft. It’s a terrific work and worth the trip. I’m on board.

—PETER GIZZI

Here’s Whitman as frequency, as force, as Emersonian truth-value. America…. Labbe is unrelenting in his focus on the friction between metaphor and referent, medium and meaning.

—MATTHEW CAREY SALYER, COLORADO REVIEW

Jason Labbe’s first book of poems, Spleen Elegy, came out in 2017. His work has appeared in Poetry, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, A Public Space, The Brooklyn Rail, and several chapbooks. He is a musician and divides his nights between Bethany, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York.