The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift, a chapbook from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023. Winner of the 2022 Sheila-Na-Gig Chapbook Contest.
Myers builds a lush world grounded in flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest that reaches for his East Coast childhood and back to his Eastern European Jewish roots. Charged as much with the lyric impulse to sing as with the narrative one to tell a story across generations, Myers’ poems bridge ancient myth with the domestic and global violence of our present, reminding us this moment is not devoid of art, but hungry for it. With each new stanza—“a memory / or flight of imagining: I hear myself / saying Home”—Myers asks us to find home in these verses, and alongside him, we do.
—Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of The Many Names for Mother and 40 WEEKS
Jed Myers’ The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift looks back on the poet’s life, and the lives who made it, less to consider an unknown future than to contemplate the unknown present. Therein lies its power and its lyric—for whether in the abstract space of memory or beneath the long shadow of the yard’s Japanese maple, this is an honest, abiding collection of family, humility, politics, love, and loss—which is to say, life’s beautiful, brutal truths.
—Simmons Buntin, author of Bloom and Riverfall