Our Past Leaves (Paperback or Softback)

The twinge, the ache, the puncture: James Croal Jackson’s poems are full of attentiveness and care, as well as grief. Those ideas aren’t opposing; the poems in Our Past Leaves show us the deep connection between what we love and what has left (and explores where that leaves us). How does loss (of a father, of childhood, of memory) change us, these poems wonder and recall. This chapbook takes us on a tour of a place both transformed and laid bare by loss. A place of junkyards and squished beetles and ever-growing grass. Here, Jackson sings, with a catch in his throat, “a sourness / in harmony, an ode to shriveled apples.”

—Hannah Stephenson, author, In the Kettle, the Shriek

In Our Past Leaves, James Croal Jackson embraces the ambiguities experienced when trying to reckon with the past, the concept of home, and personal independence. These poems wrestle with how departures and finding one’s own way fuel nostalgia’s painful yearning, and how we sometimes recognize the past as something that “did not last / so much as linger.” Aspects of nature emerge as potent symbols of family, rootedness, and the losses inherent in the passage of time. In poems that are economical, probing, and lyrical, Jackson encourages us to reflect on the seasons of our own lives.

—Steve Abbott, author, A Green Line Between Green Fields

Our Past Leaves by James Croal Jackson is a fathomless contemplation of distance and how we are built by moments we remember and maybe more so by the moments we do not. These poems are a fortress of Jackson’s own memories centered around moments with his father. Remembrances that interact with not the big events of life, but beetles and walnuts, metals gleaming in a junkyard, footsteps on the stairs, mechanics, and broken things; simple requests we hear or things we may see every day and then suddenly never again. Jackson finds the beauty in capturing these fragments, reclaimed treasures that have left us so quietly and then come rushing back to remind us who we’ve been.

—Kristian Macaron, author, Storm