Perfectly Against the Sun

In PERFECTLY AGAINST THE SUN, Zachary Michael Jack takes his readers to a middle west more far-out and more fantastical than ever imagined. In these groundbreaking tone poems, the great swath of middle country from Akron, to Wichita, to Paducah is bathed in blue, shadowed by archetypes animal and human, burned through by a fiercely purifying sun. In Jack's exquisitely layered poetic vision, the black-dirt Delta towns of Memphis and Cairo turn modern-day necropolis; Waterloo, Iowa becomes the waterloo of a thousand last stands; and row upon row of Kansas corn suggests an afterlife. The book's protagonist, alternately wearing the masks of tragedian, librettist, auteur, athlete, and impressionist, unearths the deep roots that sustain and bind, imagining his way into, and way out of, losses suffered deep in the heart of the Heartland. Here, the camp horror of Hollywood assumes eerie resonance, the athletic field reads as timeless epic, and the famously blank canvas of the Great Plains whirls into a painterly starry night. From the author of THE INANITY OF MUSIC AND WINGS comes a second book-length collection announcing a poet-storyteller among the best of his rising generation. "Zachary Michael Jack's style . Agrarian Surrealism? Homespun L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E? A tractor with a photon engine!" --Jim Clark, author of DANCING ON CANAAN'S RUINS and HANDIWORK "Here is a poet who goes about his art and craft with gusto, subtlety, and fearlessness. Each poem brings us home truths from the Heartland in many miraculous ways." --Dave Etter, author of THE ESSENTIAL DAVE ETTER and more than two dozen books of poems. "An amalgam as deep and rich as the author's native soil. " --Don Johnson, editor of HUMMERS, KNUCKLERS, AND SLOW CURVES: CONTEMPORARY BASEBALL POEMS.