Joshua Jones
A Haunting Without Allegory consists of a series of transatlantic sequences exploring hope and despair in a time of consolidated state violence and unchecked viral transmission. Embracing the ambivalences that accompany attempts to persist under untenable conditions, the poems deploy a revolving and unresolved constellation of leitmotifs and refracting images that chart, awkwardly and unevenly, themes of escape and constraint. How do we kill for real the cops that linger inside of our heads and hearts? Can tenable ways to shape our resistances be found in the compelling and obstinate sounds of poetic language? Could the indignant music of distorted syntax hint at new paths to trace through the cruelty and tenderness of the world? At once accessible and perpetually insubordinate, the poems in A Haunting Without Allegory inhabit the present’s ongoing mess, rejecting easy answers while modeling the vital importance, the important vitality, of poetry as a means of encountering the world in all of its contradictory beauty and dismay.
