Atrophy - Softcover

Burgess, Jackson

4.46

24 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938912896 ISBN 13: 9781938912894

Publisher: write bloody publishing, 2018

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In his moving debut collection, Jackson Burgess examines heartbreak, depression, and empathy through a lens of rigorous introspection.

Dive bars, gas stations, bedrooms, and snowfields comprise the setting as the speaker asks: What do we feel? What should we feel? Who gets to feel what?

Atrophy’s poems vary in location, mostly between Los Angeles and Iowa City, with reoccurring characters serving as touchstones, forming the book’s narrative. Much of the collection is about or directly addresses an ex-lover, Lily. In the wake of that failed relationship, Atrophy wrestles with loneliness, substance abuse, and dissociation, utilizing lists, letters, prose poems, and free verse.

These poems celebrate the past while mourning it, armed with the advantage of retrospect. Prescription drugs, dog fights, dance parties, love letters, and ghosts—the world depicted is at times dark, at times humorous, but always human. Atrophy is vulnerable and cinematic, a series of manic meditations exploring what it means to love and be loved, to hurt and be hurt.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

“Jackson Burgess is the most dazzling, urgently urban and unfailingly inventive young chronicler of lost highways and avenues of broken dreams since the early poems of Denis Johnson and the ballads of Tom Waits.” –David St. John, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of The Last Troubadour

“Atrophy is simply shattering—in its apocalyptic intensity, its relentless drive, its urgent music, its desperate tenderness.” –Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia

“Atrophy pulses with love, vodka, and the despair of things lost and things found...I want to gift Atrophy to every human I’ve ever met.” –Ruth Madievsky, author of Emergency Brake

About the Author:

Jackson Burgess is the author of Atrophy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018) and the chapbook Pocket Full of Glass, winner of the 2014 Clockwise Competition (Tebot Bach, 2017). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his poetry and fiction have appeared in

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.