Overview

In conversation with collections like John Ashbery's Some Trees and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium, Punishment Bag is a daring poetry debut that carves its own unsettling territory. Jake Fournier’s Punishment Bag asserts that poetry ought to exceed its author’s intelligence. At once caustic and tender, this daring debut spans from dense, refractory lyrics to lucid narratives. As ghosts materialize at the periphery of late-night dialogues and spiritual seekers slide into hedonic disaffection, ordinary objects—creamer cups and plush koalas—accrue bizarre, sacred resonance. The collection hopscotches from the American Southwest to the exurbs of Paris and culminates in a piercing, Eliotic prose poem created from a destabilizing selection of autobiographical notes. Tracing the growth of a poet’s mind, Punishment Bag extends its readers an irresistible invitation to grow in turn, to delight in the tactile density of language, and, against a backdrop of ecocide and systemic injustice, to discover new ways to make meaning.

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9780826369222

Table of Contents

Reviews

“The Punishment Bag reveals a ‘natural piety’ of rainbows that never bend, an elevation of poetic presence, and a lively game of chance and irony. The expectation of surprises and figurative penalties stay in every scene, in the ooze of bright-blue light, bear prints and fasting, the sexual taste of figs, the vouches of beekeepers, and in ‘a winter so brutal that the wolves / fed on the wind.’ Jake Fournier creates exceptional poignant promises and the curious temptation to reach into the punishment bag of his marvelous poetry.” -- Gerald Vizenor, author of <I>Theatre of Chance: Native Celebrities of Nothing in an Existential Colony</I> With a delicate and complex ear, a sly wit, and acute self-awareness, these poems move like a snake in the grass, muscled and inexplicable. The gift here is in the unsettling, in the eliding slippage and its attendant, alighting mind. We are left a bit dazed and dazzled, lead to and left entranced at the eerie heart where that dearth of understanding flows from and moves us all.” -- Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of <I>Aux/Arc Trypt Ich: Poppycock and Assphodel; Winter; A Night of Dark Trees</I> “Here is a book marvelously held together by the attempt to see what can often only be felt.” -- D. A. Powell, author of <I>Low Hanging Fruit</I>

Author Information

Jake Fournier is a firefighter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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