Jagged Tune by Rob Talbert
"How can the world be anything but a music made out of what we are, a jagged tune, a knife song, a wild blood and bone aria? In Rob Talbert’s energetic, frightening, human, kinetic collection we can hear every note. I want to download this book into the musical score it is and listen to it whenever I’m alone but desperately need the world." —Matthew Dickman
"Rob Talbert’s Jagged Tune is a gorgeous post-industrial lyric hymn to minimum-wage jobs: from corrections officer to pawn shop employee to cruise ship attendant to insurance certificate specialist to retail clerk to unemployed and back again, Talbert’s poems—hewn from life experience—contrast the constraints of work with the ecstasy of nightclubs, their “feral engine” and “deep recess of liquor techno.” “My life depends on night,” he writes, and this is a nocturnal book that embraces the wonder of darkness, its broken song. I am awed by these poems—their unyielding eye, their deft music, their capacity for wisdom, and all the ways in which they illuminate facets of the American experience that we rarely see." —Erika Meitner
