2012
A POWERFUL CHAPBOOK collection of thirteen poems, whose broken, surreal landscapes yield haunted visions reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s epic masterpieces The Dark Riders and War Is Kind.
The tragic vision of Jonathan Weinert’s Thirteen Small Apostrophes reaches far through its singular imagination and haunting diction . . . His use of apostrophe in addressing imaginary creatures becomes a kind of Genesis, summoning a chastened world from one that we’ve defiled. These are innovative, moving, and memorable poems.”
— Mark Irwin, author of Large White House Speaking
In this mysterious and musical collection of petitions and declarations to various entities, human and otherwise, Jonathan Weinert listens attentively as darkness sings its song . . . Any reader alert to exquisite lament will find herself addressed by Weinert’s song, sung to and sung for by these thirteen apostrophes that are small only in their length, not in their embrace.”
— H. L. Hix, author of First Fire, Then Birds
To Darkness
In the end, we stand together
like stopped cars. Such a white-hot day:
the stink of creosote rising from the sidings
like laughter from a brilliant joke. We laughed too,
the two of us, transfixed by daylight’s
fatal suavity.
But now, at last, we’re still, released,
although the tracks keep stitching the horizon, a stubborn wound.
Of all your choicest qualities
I love your emptiness best,
and mine. Such tender shadows, and the black
unknown: such possibility.
A few straws blowse
against your unstopped joists, and through your farther opening
a plunge of chestnuts shush their leaves.
Who doesn’t know that song,
and sing it,
even if the signals clang and shriek to clear the right-of-way?
I know an older song, the one you taught me,
which you made, the one without a melody,
or words, or breath.
The silent one. The one with all the gorgeous rests.