Our Tiny Little Lives - Couverture souple

J.I.B

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798456885227

Editeur : Independently published, 2021

Synopsis

J.I.B. writes incendiary poems that pinball through a readers thoughts, and by the time a reader is four poems deep into this collection, you’ll realize the poems are exploding as you finish each one, and shards of fragmented phrases and words are flying through your brain matter, leaving blood and pink brain tissue splattered on each page.

“Our Tiny Little Lives” is a collection of poems written in response to a tough childhood. A childhood full of dead kittens, car crashes, some avoidable some not, and full of blood, bruises, violence, broken bones and broken spirits. A childhood featuring a cast of broken adults, some with addictions and mental health issues, and most bearing the scars of generational curses that itch and burn to be passed on, and passed on again.

J.I.B. spends the length of the book, searching for a way to make all the blood and pain make sense. Looking for answers to who is going to look after the children. Finding no adults remotely capable of leading the way, the poems in “Our Tiny Little Lives” are left to mind themselves, and the result is a fascinating journey through Midwestern childhood desperation, poverty and abuse.

The book is graphic, straightforward, and unflinching. Big topics, big worldwide problems, and the biggest of the big traumas, written in a unique style, and a simple vernacular that leaves no questions. The world is a jacked up place, there’s little hope of saving ourselves, and our only hope of finding respite is in writing poems like prayers.

-Dan Denton
Author of $100-A-Week Motel



Reading the prose poems in Our Tiny Little Lives is like passing through somebody’s nightmare. Surrealistic, hallucinatory—J.I.B displays an uncanny ability to reinhabit the mind of a tortured child with its wreckage. The speaker of one poem says he is “obsessed with a video that when rewound shows damage being undone,” which could well be the core theme for this collection, as the poet bravely rewinds his life trying to make sense of a mother who wants to drive into oncoming traffic and a fearful father figure who passes out everywhere in his own piss. As the child grows into adulthood he wrestles his demons, which include substance abuse, violence, and illness. Yet, the poems strike through the purely confessional to a universal level. Who hasn’t ever envied a simple creature unburdened with knowledge or memory, as when the speaker in one poem asserts that the common fly is God’s perfect creation because it is “too small to understand anything besides hunger, the pleasure of eating, and the urge to fuck.” Darkly philosophical, emotionally honest, with a coherent voice and technical skill, J.I.B. takes us on a truly harrowing journey.

-Neil Carpathios, Author of “The Function of Sadness


Blurb for Our Tiny Little Lives

In his beautiful, bruising collection, Our Tiny Little Lives, J.I.B offers us raw, astonishingly honest reportage on what it means to grow up in today’s America, a country where “everything is just / moments before collapse.” The speakers of these poems have somehow survived youth riven by the omnipresence of terrible television, piss-drunk fathers, Adderall, broken families, communities plagued by addiction, friends who cut themselves, suicide attempts, and the fact that “sometimes mothers / drive into buildings attempting to save themselves.” Our Tiny Little Lives is a must-read for our moment, a devastating account of the very American despair of legions of children left decidedly behind. J.I.B is one of the most daring poets writing today.


—Francisca Bell, Author of “Bright Stain”

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2021
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798456885227
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 60
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg