Overview

Reader, the book you hold is made of poems which make a novel constantly unmaking itself; an (unfinished) essay on ""Unrealistic Conceptions of Love in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano""; and a letter from a former lover to a formerly beloved. Much of the book's matter is compressed into that most compact and demanding of fixed forms, the triolet, which, in Jesse DeLong's deft and artful hands, acts as a prism, refracting and defamiliarizing language, thought, and feeling, and revealing the mind to itself as ""a collage/ different than exists in the known universe."" Also revealed: the heart, here a vessel for vinegar, that astringent, if flavorful, if no longer intoxicating, remnant of love. Maximalist and minimalist, brilliant and tender, The Vinegar in Our Hearts resists the constraining artifice of closure, offering instead ""silence and solitude not as an emptiness, but as a fullness of self."" Take it as it is offered: in kind. -Brad Richard, author of Turned Earth

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9781968148331

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Jesse DeLong's The Vinegar in Our Hearts reminds me of why I fell in love with traditional forms. DeLong commits to the triolet form for almost the entirety of this collection, and over time, language gets more slippery, slides right through our fingers."" -Taylor Byas, author of Resting Bitch Face ""In this contemplative and stirring collection, Jesse DeLong uses the constrictive triolet to tell an expansive story of both loss and possibility. These poems are mirrors held up to themselves . . . a formal book of wild and epic proportions."" -Adam Clay, author of Circle Back

Author Information

Jesse DeLong is the author of The Amateur Scientist's Notebook (2021). He works as the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University where he teaches writing and literature. Other work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, and Typo as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. He lives in Louisiana with his wife, Keosha, and his daughter, Alora.

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