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""Jonathan Aaron is the master of the noir fable. Ranging from the darkly humorous to the elegiac, the poems in Just About Anything both show and recount how the ordinary can slip at any moment into the unsteady worlds of legend and dream: A dog advises her master to read Solzhenitsyn; a landlady's husband turns into a giant snake; a man time-travels to tell Bach about the future. Aaron's haunting collection leads us to places where we experience ourselves––suddenly and unpredictably––'more truly and more strange.'” * Rosanna Warren * ""In Just About Anything, Jonathan Aaron invites us into a world unlike any other––a place of dark wonders and strange delights, where even the sunniest landscapes can hold mystery and muted menace. In one poem Nikolai Gogol ruins a stew, in another the Invisible Man riffles the pages of a book, in yet another a man bows to the wisdom of a magic horse. Such moments seem natural in the alternate realities these poems explore. And beyond such uneasy fun, a series of powerful love poems reveals the depth of feeling that underlies the inventiveness of this superb collection."" * John Skoyles * “'What’s it like coming back to life and discovering / you’re fluent in a dead language?' the narrator wonders in this book so brilliantly alive to what it’s saying that just like that we’re ready for Just About Anything. Imagine poems as uncanny as they are disenchanted, capable of great metaphysical and historical reach yet never raising their voice or venturing too far from the plainest words in the language, and hardly a single line that isn’t in the service of exacting finer gradations of feeling: these are just some of the four decades worth of lyric felicities registered in Jonathan Aaron’s work. What Adam Zagajewski described as poetry that mediates the stringent necessities of 'the shabby and the sublime' fits his temperament to a T."" * George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos *

""'What's it like coming back to life and discovering / you're fluent in a dead language?' the narrator wonders in this book so brilliantly alive to what it's saying that just like that we're ready for Just About Anything. Imagine poems as uncanny as they are disenchanted, capable of great metaphysical and historical reach yet never raising their voice or venturing too far from the plainest words in the language, and hardly a single line that isn't in the service of exacting finer gradations of feeling: these are just some of the four decades worth of lyric felicities registered in Jonathan Aaron's work. What Adam Zagajewski described as poetry that mediates the stringent necessities of 'the shabby and the sublime' fits his temperament to a T.""-- ""George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos"" ""In Just About Anything, Jonathan Aaron invites us into a world unlike any other--a place of dark wonders and strange delights, where even the sunniest landscapes can hold mystery and muted menace. In one poem Nikolai Gogol ruins a stew, in another the Invisible Man riffles the pages of a book, in yet another a man bows to the wisdom of a magic horse. Such moments seem natural in the alternate realities these poems explore. And beyond such uneasy fun, a series of powerful love poems reveals the depth of feeling that underlies the inventiveness of this superb collection.""-- ""John Skoyles"" ""Jonathan Aaron is the master of the noir fable. Ranging from the darkly humorous to the elegiac, the poems in Just About Anything both show and recount how the ordinary can slip at any moment into the unsteady worlds of legend and dream: A dog advises her master to read Solzhenitsyn; a landlady's husband turns into a giant snake; a man time-travels to tell Bach about the future. Aaron's haunting collection leads us to places where we experience ourselves--suddenly and unpredictably--'more truly and more strange.'""-- ""Rosanna Warren""

Author Information

Jonathan Aaron is the author of three previous books of poems, including Second Sight, Corridor, and Journey to the Lost City. His poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Raritan, among others, and they have been included five times in Best American Poetry. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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