Jorn Ake • The Circle Line

Jorn Ake’s new volume of poems is a bright scrabble of objects suffering a pitched change of light and not of our sun but of a shared memory of classical mechanical proteins that are still a mystery to us. I think here of the cast-off daybooks of a Gogol or Ramanujan. The stylized movement of imagery across these poems is kin to some lost Greek number theory linked to the masked animal dance that heals and repeats. If you would like to remember what all of us most distantly forgot, then please by any means purchase this book.
   • Norman Dubie

The figurative subtlety and range of these poems made this book an imaginative feast. Throughout, I had a sense that I was being presented the story of a life by means of a deeper language, as if Jorn Ake has figured out how to speak directly through the feelings that attach to actions, objects and memories. With a work this metaphorical, I look at what recurs—the desert and childhood, photography and music, violence on a personal and political scale, —and there is an ongoing, loving nod to the artists who have shaped this poet’s mind. I also sense that what drives his work is a desire to characterize the feeling of a time period, the later 20th century, with all its “…blindness/flying moth-crazy about the light.” I cannot turn away from these poems. This is a fascinating book.
   • Bob Hickok