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Boys Whistling like Canaries is a mesmerizing journey through the political cruelty of the twentieth century. The connecting thread is the relationship between father and son, parent and child, and the complexity of basic survival in the face of the annihilation wrought by inhumane disregard. Sweeping through a landscape framed by religion and literature, the poems argue that history has consistently failed to inoculate us against war and oppressionagainst the tyranny of governments who turn on their people, people who turn on their neighborseven as the voice behind those poems refuses to lose hope for the eventuality of Lincoln's "better angels of our nature."
About the author
JORN AKE began as a painter, graduating from the College of William and Mary with a BA in fine arts. Ten years later, he moved to Arizona to complete an MFA in creative writing at Arizona State University. His first collection of poems, Asleep in the Lightning Fields, won the 2001 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2002. Popular Ink released a chapbook of his work, All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems, in 2007, and his second full-length collection, The Circle Line, is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press. He began writing Boys Whistling like Canaries in Prague, where he lived for three years. He currently lives in New York City.
