Overview

"In this debut collection, Jesse Nathan matches an exquisite feeling for the music of lines and sentences with his profound explorations of the idea of home. The book's title comes from the word for a bit of cartilage on a baby bird's beak, a growth that helps it break out of the egg. Shortly after the bird hatches, the tooth disappears. Like an eggtooth, Nathan's poems are often figures for birth, for the violence of birth and, in his case, rebirth. They follow an unusual and passionate boy from his childhood on a wheat farm in the watershed of the Running Turkey Creek in rural southcentral Kansas -- ""the land was always the solace"" -- to his life years later in a coastal city. Ecology, family, history, sexuality, and poetry itself are his subjects, but in all these matters, Nathan's rich formal imagination travels our fundamental feelings of alienation and belonging. In a style somehow both lavish and plainspoken, in free verse and inherited forms, Eggtooth takes us from straw-bale fortresses in the hayloft, from fishing in streams and days so hot the ""blank road shimmers"" as the heat drives you out of your ""straw-frail"" mind, to the respite and loneliness of a far-off city plaza, to the ""waves in their folding"" at the edge where an ocean comes ""boiling"" onto sand. With verbal precision and abiding sympathy, Nathan's poems announce a capacious and deeply compelling new voice in American letters."

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Reviews

"""[Eggtooth] is attentive and observant ... Powerful ... A work of mystical observations.""-- ""The Millions"" ""[Eggtooth] is ornate, highly musical, finding a kind of Marianne Moore-ish delight in expansive description ... My favorite moments are those when Nathan's speaker (that bookish boy) confronts his queerness ... Nathan's delight in stretching the bounds of our common ecologies of language, in trying to describe something until words are exhausted, might be called devotion.""-- ""West Branch"" ""An outstanding book of pastoral poetry from an impressive new voice. Nathan is a masterful poet -- his language is vivid and alive.""-- ""Kirkus Reviews"" ""By turns finely wrought and bracingly direct ... alert to the wonderful and terrible things that happen beneath our feet. Nathan's ear for language and eye for the intersection of natural splendor and trauma are informed by his youth ... melding self-aware metaphor with age-old rigor.""-- ""The San Francisco Chronicle"" ""Excellent ... lavishly granular and as expansive as the 'wildered sky' ... Sensuous pleasures and fresh revelations ... A significant new voice.""-- ""Publishers Weekly, starred review"" ""Gorgeous ... a new sort of sting ... as concentrated with meaning as it is with sound. The drama in this 'growth of a poet's mind' is in the language. Nathan's style resembles those most sonically extravagant of poets writing in English who retain the power of narrative, from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Hart Crane to John Berryman and (more recently) Atsuro Riley.""-- ""The Adroit Journal"" ""If John Donne 'makes one little room an everywhere, ' Nathan makes everywhere fit into his intricate rooms. His Kansas poems itemize local idioms and dignify minor moments with word-painting, impasto-thick. His triple-rhymed cadences make him an unusually melodious and affirmative elegist. [Eggtooth] is a tuning fork of regional sonorities, but it's also the original 'call' to poetry, still singing out 'personal and clear, ' no matter how long the distance.""-- ""Poetry Foundation"" ""Nathan attends to every sound. He wants us to chew our food thoroughly before we swallow, in the tradition of meticulous makers such as Emily Dickinson and her offspring Heather McHugh and Lisa Russ Spaar. Savor it.""-- ""At the Seawall"" ""Nathan delivers. The eye for the world around sharpens in these forms, bringing 'sunflowers like skinny men with rubberneck looks, ' 'the yarrow-strewn casket' and a smoking 'gravedigger with no sleeves' ... Humor bustles beneath nuanced sonic play, while poems throttle a sense of place.""-- ""Lit Hub"" ""Remarkable ... ambitious ... Here's to our eggteeth.""-- ""Southern Humanities Review"" ""The first thing one notices when one reads a Jesse Nathan poem is: one's body humming along to the music of his words ... the meaning lives in the music here ... That is, Eggtooth's music is so fresh, on both the micro and macro level, as the sound plays a live role in Nathan's explorations of memory, his various investigations into ecology, into poetics of place, into history. There's a generous variousness to this poet's lyric impulse. Eggtooth is not an ordinary debut but something quite different.""-- ""McSweeney's"""

Author Information

Jesse Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. He teaches literature at UC Berkeley, and he was a founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New Republic. This is his first book.

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