Overview

All Saints and Other American Sonnets is a collection of poems that bridges the landscapes of the American Midwest with the cultural memory and mythos of Eastern Europe. From Kansas dirt roads to the streets of Warsaw and the ruins of Mariupol, these sonnets trace the scars of labor, war, migration, and memory across continents and generations. Written in a clear, lyrical language, the collection revisits the working-class poetics of place while engaging with philosophical and historical undercurrents: existential reflection, folklore, the toll of capitalism, and the persistence of family and faith. These are poems of rusted pickups and cracked sidewalks, of ancestral graves and mythic beasts, where the sacred and the profane coexist in everyday life. Formally, the poems follow a broad definition of the sonnet: structured with three quatrains and a final couplet, but unconstrained by rhyme and meter. Each poem contains a volta, or rhetorical turn, honoring the tradition of the sonnet while adapting it to contemporary concerns and voices. In embracing this flexible form, the collection claims space in the lineage of the ""American"" sonnet-one that privileges open language, personal experience, and poetic honesty over formal rigidity. At once elegiac and grounded, the poems find poetry in the rhythms of manual labor, in generational wisdom passed through calloused hands, and in fleeting moments of communion with land, language, and loss. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Stanislaw Wyspiański and William Stafford, the voice in this collection is both intimate and expansive-rooted in specific geographies while attuned to global crises and the human condition.

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Jack J. B. Hutchens was born and raised in the Flint Hills of Kansas. He attended Emporia State University where he studied poetry under Phil Heldrich and Christopher Howell. After graduation, he lived in Poland for several years, finding a new home there. When he returned, he completed his PhD in Slavic Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After teaching Polish literature for several years, he is now a high school teacher of English at Plainfield East High School in Illinois where he lives with his wife Amanda and their daughter Harriet. He is the author of a book of poetry, There/Here: Poems of Journey and Home, and a monograph Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction.

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