Punishment Bag: Poems [Paperback]

In conversation with collections like John Ashbery'sSome Treesand Wallace Stevens'sHarmonium,Punishment Bagis a daring poetry debut that carves its own unsettling territory.

Jake Fournier’sPunishment Bagasserts that poetry ought to exceed its author’s intelligence. At once caustic and tender, this daring debut spans from dense, refractory lyrics to lucid narratives. As ghosts materialize at the periphery of late-night dialogues and spiritual seekers slide into hedonic disaffection, ordinary objects—creamer cups and plush koalas—accrue bizarre, sacred resonance. The collection hopscotches from the American Southwest to the exurbs of Paris and culminates in a piercing, Eliotic prose poem created from a destabilizing selection of autobiographical notes. Tracing the growth of a poet’s mind,Punishment Bagextends its readers an irresistible invitation to grow in turn, to delight in the tactile density of language, and, against a backdrop of ecocide and systemic injustice, to discover new ways to make meaning.Jake Fournieris a firefighter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts."...a debut collection so stylistically various, so deviously sequenced, that not once could I guess what species of poem would come next."“ThePunishment Bagreveals a ‘natural piety’ of rainbows that never bend, an elevation of poetic presence, and a lively game of chance and irony. The expectation of surprises and figurative penalties stay in every scene, in the ooze of bright-blue light, bear prints and fasting, the sexual taste of figs, the vouches of beekeepers, and in ‘a winter so brutal that the wolves / fed on the wind.’ Jake Fournier creates exceptional poignant promises and the curious temptation to reach into the punishment bag of his marvelous poetry.”With a delicate andlã