Rogue Astronaut [Paperback]

At the core ofRogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobss debut poetry collection, is a mystery: Was the poets father abducted by aliens as a teenager? From this uncanny family lore spins a gravitational field of theory, grief, and imagination, spurring speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds: What are the limits of understanding between two alien anatomies, between two unlike minds? Are we, after all, finally alone?

In poems that continually veer from play to reverence, from body horror to bodily delight, encounters with bed bugs and cuttlefish appear side by side with retro gaming and phantom light. A brother living with delusions turns toward the sky. The poet also peers skyward in search of connectionacross family lines, across the bodys borders, across galaxies. Outer space becomes a metaphorical terrain where queer desire and spiritual longing collide. Just as Agent Mulders iconicX-Filesposter declares I WANT TO BELIEVE, so do these poems ache to trust in something moreextraterrestrial life, divine presence, intimacy.

Jacobss electrifying collection offers readers a singular voice attuned to the strangeness of living nowwhere science fiction and memory, tenderness and dissociation, belief and doubt pulse in tangled orbit. With wit, vision, and formal inventiveness,Rogue Astronautcharts a course through the mysterious and the intimate, inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting across distance, time, and the alien terrain of self.

In Mitchell Jacobss stunning debut,Rogue Astronaut, were invited to ask what the future holds for us in this age of the earths vendetta / against flesh, which it punishes / and punishes then decomposes. These poems are meditations on the nature of the body as we struggle with our corporeal pleasures and failures even while imagining some future deliverance of a newly forged incorporeal self. These remarkable poems of human rlcf