Poetry

Atrophy

Winner of Write Bloody Publishing’s 2017 Jack McCarthy Book Prize

“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, 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

“Jackson Burgess is the poet of a stark confessional despair so believed in, and trusted, that it becomes an optimism.” –Josh Bell, author of Alamo Theory

“Is hope the thing with feathers or is hope ‘the thing with teeth you keep locked in the medicine cabinet?’ Atrophy is a book that unlocks the jaws of hope and holds us ‘there in the lungs of it.’ It’s a place where your best chance of surviving a tornado is to be knocked out by a slab of concrete, where cats want nothing more than to be hit by cars, where love offers you avocados and takes the knives away. Atrophy is at once the most tender, tragic, and hilarious book of poems I’ve ever read. These poems pulse with love, vodka, and the despair of things lost and things found. Jackson Burgess has created a world where we are all ‘like that octopus that figured out how to open a jar underwater from the inside, and instead of swimming out just sat there, sort of looking around.’ Or maybe like me, you already live in that world. Maybe like me, you need these poems, need a book like Atrophy to convey so intimately what it means to be alive and in love, both the ghost and the haunting. I want to gift Atrophy to every human I’ve ever met.” –Ruth Madievsky, author of Emergency Brake

Pocket Full of Glass

Winner of Tebot Bach’s 2014 Clockwise Chapbook Competition

“Jackson Burgess is a phenomenal young poet, and whether he’s writing against the backdrops of Los Angeles (and its dark underworld) or the bohemian gloss of Paris, he is the most urgent and raw urban Transcendentalist in recent American poetry. The cinematic visual intelligence and the visceral rhythmic power of these poems is dazzling—Pocket Full of Glass is nothing less than a brilliant debut.” –David St. John

“Jackson Burgess’s poems are astonishing—the way they keep going further when you think there is no further to go, taking language itself out past the borders of what can be said, what can be thought or felt or borne, toward a kind of beauty that owes nothing to convention or order or the laws of beauty, but belongs wholly to the poet’s own unflinching vision of the mutilated world. ‘Try to praise the mutilated world,’ Adam Zagajewski has written, and Jackson Burgess has taken up that challenge, and then some. In Pocket Full of Glass, he gives us poems full of risk and passion, full of despair for the wreckage of the bruised and shattered landscapes through which he moves—urban Los Angeles, night-time Paris, those rooms in which we cannot die, in which the loneliness of lovers is matched only by the longing, still, for love. And somewhere in all the wreckage, something keeps shining like a shard of glass, a jagged piece of light.” –Cecilia Woloch