Details

ISBN-10: 0810147645
ISBN-13: 9780810147645
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Publish Date: 09/15/2024
Dimensions: 8.80" L, 5.90" W, 0.40" H

Find Me When You’re Ready: Poems

Paperback

Price: $18.00

Overview

A powerful debut and a lyric coming-of-age narrative that interrogates the myths we carry

In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth–movies, lore, graphic novels–these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.

As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Perry Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.

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Reviews
"In Perry Janes we have a powerful new voice in poetry. Now LA based, but coming out of metropolitan Detroit's eclectic body of poets, Janes writes in all genres, but at long-last comes Find Me When You're Ready, a stirring debut poetry collection divided into five acts. Janes displays, beneath the skill acquired over years of 'doing the work, ' an unabashed earnestness that suggests an authentic need to say what cannot be easily told. As he notes, there are 'so many / routes to the heart's city.' Janes writes as if through a prism–from several vantages. He compellingly repeats, insists, retracts, and iterates details of stories in an attempt not to get to the 'what' of an event, but the 'who.' To whom has this happened and who has this storyteller become? Janes is at the core a storyteller, and as any good storyteller knows, memory has its demands–Janes is determined to meet them. Read this bildungsroman and you will be inspired by Janes's unsparing commitment to self-reclamation and hard-won joy." –Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World

"If a book could be your best friend, could be the dreamt of gentle avenger who gets you through the hardest nights of childhood. If a book could let you know life is so hard, but just wait, and you will find a world where even the pain you endured will find a way to blossom into deep health, into the deeply generative erotic. If a book could say: yes, the city is burning, the world is burning, some wounds never heal: but look at all your beloveds assembling. If a book could go back in time and teach me how to become an adult and carry my losses and make a world of extraordinary beauty that never says those losses didn't happen? God, that book would be this book. Find Me When You're Ready. I have been waiting my whole life." –Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

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Details

ISBN-10: 0810147645
ISBN-13: 9780810147645
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Publish Date: 09/15/2024
Dimensions: 8.80" L, 5.90" W, 0.40" H
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