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"Like the ancient sea charts of the book's title, Jason Sommer here marks the routes and stories of journeys we all can recognize as vaguely familiar, but in Sommer's retelling these otherwise mundane treks spark of something surprisingly rich and strange. Employing traditional lyrics, narrative verse, and more experimental forms, Sommer takes us down to the sea floor, or into a basement bursting with centuries of storage, or through the successive layers of a single consciousness. Throughout this book, the speaker in the poems questions what can and can't be known of the self and the other, of love, of what we value, and of what we insist has permanence, despite evidence to the contrary. And, like the ancient cartographers who lavished their skill upon their artworks, the book embraces the possibilities of beauty in the journey's rendering"--
About the author
Jason Sommer is the author of four previous books of poetry, most recently
The Laughter of Adam and Eve, and two in the Phoenix series:
Other People's Troubles and
The Man Who Sleeps in My Office. He has also published English versions of Irish language poems and two collaborative book-length translations of contemporary Chinese fiction. His poems have appeared in publications such as the
New Republic,
Ploughshares,
Chicago Review,
Agni,
River Styx, and
TriQuarterly, among others.
Summary
Taking cues from medieval sea charts—portulans—the poems in Jason Sommer’s collection bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey.
