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"Jackson Holbert's Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us"--
List of contents
For Jakob . 1
I2003 . 4
We Learned the Mountains by Heart . 5 The Christmas Poem . 6Letter from Nine Mile . 7Letter Sent and Subsequently Returned by the Mailman . 8These White Letters Look Nothing Like the Snow . 11For Taylor . 14The 26th Birthday Poem . 16 The Lamps . 17
II The Book of JakobUnsent Letter to Jakob . 21Another Winter Poem . 22Jakob in the Basement . 25Another Summer Withdrawal Poem . 27 Waking in the City . 29Unfinished Letter to Jakob . 31Poem with a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It . 33 After Rilke . 35Poem . 36One Last Poem for Jakob . 37
IIIWorld War I Poem . 41 World War I Poem . 43 Evil Nature . 45 January . 46Fragment . 47Burying the Dead High Up on the Mountain . 48Love Poem to the Terrible Doctors . 50 Poem Containing No Pills . 51After C.D. Wright . 52Dream Where the Men Are in My House, Eating My Food, and Stealing My Ideas . 53
IVLandscape . 57The Water Poem . 58 Two Pastoral Poems . 61 The Uncle Poem . 63 Moth . 68
Notes . 69
Acknowledgments . 71
About the author
Jackson Holbert is the author of Winter Stranger. He was born and raised in eastern Washington. His poems have appeared in Narrative, The Nation, and Poetry. He received an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and lives in Oakland, California.
Summary
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 poems incite 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.
The Winter Stranger audiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.
Foreword
- Digital galley campaign, with outreach targeted at major, poetry and regional media; digital galley available for download on Edelweiss
- Media outreach positioning the collection as an accessible, vulnerable and intimate account of addiction, toxic masculinity and the drug and poverty epidemic in small-town America
- Advertising with the Academy of American Poets
- Special promotion to seed sales around National Recovery Month (September)
- Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts
- Academic outreach to seed book in MFA and poetry courses
- Major launch in Oakland
