Jason Schneiderman

Description:

In Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire, Jason Schneiderman confronts the rise of extremism and antisemitism in the United States while grappling with the end of his marriage and finding his feet as a newly single gay man.

Following up on his landmark collection Hold Me Tight, Jason Schneiderman extends his personal and historical explorations in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Schneiderman’s signature sense of humor works as a connective tissue across the book, even as the juxtapositions become more unlikely (Kafka and Hillary Clinton?), the historical scope becomes wider, and the personal revelations cut deeper than ever before. These poems represent Schneiderman’s most direct and explicit exploration of Jewish heritage and history, bringing to the surface a theme that has often been missed in his work. The strength of these poems is in their power to trace the wound as a form of healing, to confront the agonizing in order to make way for joy and, yes, love.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Few poets can match Schneiderman’s sprawling imaginative powers or the vastness of feeling he puts forth in his poems, qualities that can be found in abundance in this extraordinary book. From clickbait to heartbreak to a national march toward fascism, these poems interrogate their materials with wit, rage, and tenderness—while always, somehow, reaching toward love.”

—Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route

Jason Schneiderman’s Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire is replete with quirky poems about nearly everything—including divorce, embalming, and cooking—but mostly, the collection is peopled, so to speak, with stories. There is the one with “the intoxicating” hot wax on one’s skin. The one where a cabbie drives to the right address but in the wrong borough. The one where you have “a fake passport to escape Czarist Russia” and the one about “living a hypothetical life.” Revel in Schneiderman’s latest wonder-full collection! 

—Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies

“Schneiderman is one of our nation’s best poets and Self Portrait as Icarus as a Country on Fire may be his finest book yet. Dangerously free, these poems are finely wrought and unfettered powerhouses. Each poem holds a vigilant clarity and a fearsome passion that astounds.”

—Ada Limón, poet laureate of the United States

Description:

In five poetic sequences, Jason Schneiderman’s Hold Me Tight considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner. Starting with a long poem about his own struggle to find peace, the collection is searingly grounded in the personal, anchored to Schneiderman’s own life. The collection moves to a sequence of parables about wolves, which obliquely consider intractable political conflicts and the emotional fallout of relationships that are structured around predators and prey. The next sequences focus on technology and art, looking at how technologies extend the possibilities of the human body, which alters what it means to be human. A long set of poems about Chris Burden explore the artist’s movement from the personal, self-inflicted violence of his early work to the larger questions of political violence that inform his later work. In the final sequence, Schneiderman imagines a series of “last things”—in which finality gives meaning to the people and things in question. In the end, Schneiderman’s project invokes a kind of old fashioned humanism, which embraces the ruptures of our contemporary ways of living and thinking.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Jason Schneiderman’s Hold Me Tight is a tour de force of risk and vulnerability.  The images that populate this book—from wolves to submarines—show how every story we’ve ever been told (every fairy tale heard, every movie watched) becomes an internalized part of our reality.  And that reality is made all the more real when we can talk about it.  These poems read like a wrought conversation the speaker only wishes he could have: “I needed/that story once; I’m telling it to you now,/because I know I may need it again.”  And the discursive mode here always leads us to a place of surprise, a place where Schneiderman can declare, “This is the one thing/I have never told anyone. I still believe in the circle./I may be the last, but I believe.”  What a tenderly beautiful book!”—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“Jason Schneiderman’s poems are rife with a dark and gorgeous intelligence.  If I compare them to a razor in an apple, please understand that I mean both the razor and the apple.”—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Description:

Primary Source presents Jason Schneiderman’s most exuberant volume of poetry, as he plays with the literary canon and explores his own personal archive. Starting with rewritten lyrics that put Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” squarely in po-biz, Schneiderman takes on everyone from Shakespeare to Ashbery, making stops along the personal and the political, and interrogating ideas of race, sexuality, and love. Playful and profound, Schneiderman’s light touch is guaranteed to send tingles up your spine.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Jason Schneiderman’s Primary Source is a sparkling demonstration of this principle: a poet evolves by making as many aspects of the self as possible available on the page. By turns sardonic and sincere, nakedly vulnerable or armored in irony, the wild magpie intelligence shaping these poems plucks threads from Shakespeare and Stein, borrows forms from Cole Porter and Wittgenstein, and bows to a variety of influences so vast (Sylvia Plath and David Lee Rothe) as to constitute a way of situating the self, introducing the dizzily happy reader to a queer subject, a livewire thinker at work, a breathing human presence.”—Mark Doty