"Radical and intimate, breathtaking in scope, Jesse Nathan’s The San Francisco Poem makes of that great city a palimpsest: every alley, every room populated by warm bodies and ghosts, violent machinations and the privacy of lovers, the night breeze coming in off the bay waking us to a great simultaneity. A visionary document, a 'lunatic symphony' of epistles and reveries— I’ve never read anything quite like it. Stunning."  —Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer

"From its epoch-making opening to its crystalline closing, The San Francisco Poem is a superb book of diurnal digression about life in a city that is as beautiful as it is volatile. Jesse Nathan is a perfect bard of this paradox. Richly variegated, intimate, detached, and encyclopedic, his poetic register is as changing as the city’s. Above all, it is full of the subversive fun infamous to the San Francisco sound, which Nathan pushes to fresh heights in this book of turbulent wonder. The San Francisco Poem cements Jesse Nathan’s prodigious talent, rising to the scale of the poets he directly or indirectly pays homage to—Spicer, Gunn, Kyger, Hillman, Crane, Merrill, Ammons, and Oppen—visionary company to whom Nathan adds his own charged 'intensity of a documentarian Arachne or Ceres.' Fine, fine work." —Ishion Hutchinson, author of Far District

"Add the everyday magic of Jack Spicer to the psychological precision of Marie Howe. Multiply that with the frankness of Lucille Clifton. Take all of it to the exponential and elegant power of Agha Shahid Ali. You'll get this moving and sweeping collection by Jesse Nathan. A calendar of ode-elegies, where the speaker is each day 'a single data point / indexing local reality,' The San Francisco Poem is a social history of love in the bewitching face of longing. The delicate music and dogged insight of these poems will not only spellbind you, 'the drummer's thunder / drumming in [your] heart and shoulder,' but leave you feeling like 'this day is not all dying' as well. 'Any love story,' Nathan discovers, 'is a story about time.' Indeed. Need I say more?" —Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

"Radical and intimate, breathtaking in scope, Jesse Nathan’s The San Francisco Poem makes of that great city a palimpsest: every alley, every room populated by warm bodies and ghosts, violent machinations and the privacy of lovers, the night breeze coming in off the bay waking us to a great simultaneity. A visionary document, a 'lunatic symphony' of epistles and reveries— I’ve never read anything quite like it. Stunning."  —Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer

 

"From its epoch-making opening to its crystalline closing, The San Francisco Poem is a superb book of diurnal digression about life in a city that is as beautiful as it is volatile. Jesse Nathan is a perfect bard of this paradox. Richly variegated, intimate, detached, and encyclopedic, his poetic register is as changing as the city’s. Above all, it is full of the subversive fun infamous to the San Francisco sound, which Nathan pushes to fresh heights in this book of turbulent wonder. The San Francisco Poem cements Jesse Nathan’s prodigious talent, rising to the scale of the poets he directly or indirectly pays homage to—Spicer, Gunn, Kyger, Hillman, Crane, Merrill, Ammons, and Oppen—visionary company to whom Nathan adds his own charged 'intensity of a documentarian Arachne or Ceres.' Fine, fine work." —Ishion Hutchinson, author of Far District

 

"Add the everyday magic of Jack Spicer to the psychological precision of Marie Howe. Multiply that with the frankness of Lucille Clifton. Take all of it to the exponential and elegant power of Agha Shahid Ali. You'll get this moving and sweeping collection by Jesse Nathan. A calendar of ode-elegies, where the speaker is each day 'a single data point / indexing local reality,' The San Francisco Poem is a social history of love in the bewitching face of longing. The delicate music and dogged insight of these poems will not only spellbind you, 'the drummer's thunder / drumming in [your] heart and shoulder,' but leave you feeling like 'this day is not all dying' as well. 'Any love story,' Nathan discovers, 'is a story about time.' Indeed. Need I say more?" —Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

Praise for Eggtooth

"Excellent…lavishly granular and as expansive as the ‘wildered sky’…Sensuous pleasures and fresh revelations…A significant new voice." —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

"An outstanding book of pastoral poetry from an impressive new voice. Nathan is a masterful poet—his language is vivid and alive." —Kirkus Reviews

 "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." —Ilya Kaminsky, McSweeney’s

"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." —Katie Peterson, The Adroit Journal