Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert's Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.
In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into "a thousand red granules." Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. "I left that town / forever," Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poemsincite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave-if it's ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.
Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry's power to tame it. "I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You'll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground." Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish-"your hair, your ears, your hands."-leaving behind "the fucked up / trees," the "long, cold river." In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.
"It is clear now that there are no ends," Holbert writes, "Just winters." Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.
TheWinter Strangeraudiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.
Table of Contents:
For Jakob . 1
I
2003 . 4
We Learned the Mountains by Heart . 5
The Christmas Poem . 6
Letter from Nine Mile . 7
Letter Sent and Subsequently Returned by the Mailman . 8
These White Letters Look Nothing Like the Snow . 11
For Taylor . 14
The 26th Birthday Poem . 16
The Lamps . 17
II The Book of Jakob
Unsent Letter to Jakob . 21
Another Winter Poem . 22
Jakob in the Basement . 25
Another Summer Withdrawal Poem . 27
Waking in the City . 29
Unfinished Letter to Jakob . 31
Poem with a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It . 33
After Rilke . 35
Poem . 36
One Last Poem for Jakob . 37
III
World War I Poem . 41
World War I Poem . 43
Evil Nature . 45
January . 46
Fragment . 47
Burying the Dead High Up on the Mountain . 48
Love Poem to the Terrible Doctors . 50
Poem Containing No Pills . 51
After C.D. Wright . 52
Dream Where the Men Are in My House, Eating My Food, and Stealing My Ideas . 53
IV
Landscape . 57
The Water Poem . 58
Two Pastoral Poems . 61
The Uncle Poem . 63
Moth . 68
Notes . 69
Acknowledgments . 71
