Jorn Ake

Poetry
6 x 9, 104 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-59766-050-1
Paper: $15.95

Boys Whistling like Canaries is a mesmerizing journey through the political cruelty of the twentieth century. The connecting threads are the relationship between parent and child and the complexity of basic survival in the face of the annihilation wrought by inhuman disregard. Sweeping through a landscape framed by religion and literature, the poems argue that history has consistently failed to inoculate us against war and oppression—against the tyranny of governments who turn on their people, people who turn on their neighbors—even as the voice behind those poems refuses to lose hope for the eventuality of Lincoln's “better angels of our nature.”

Jorn Ake began writing Boys Whistling like Canaries in Prague, where he lived for three years. He graduated from the College of William and Mary with a BA in fine arts and then worked as a painter for ten years, before moving to Arizona to complete an MFA in creative writing at Arizona State University. His first collection of poems, Asleep in the Lightning Fields, won the 2001 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. A new chapbook of his work, All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems, is available from Popular Ink, and his second full-length collection, The Circle Line, will appear from The Backwaters Press early in 2009. In 2003, he was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. He currently lives in New York City.

“Jorn Ake's poems delight in the raw energy that words possess when they are given the necessary space and context in which to perform their magic. We read his poems a little breathlessly, with a delighted, uneasy wonder, ushered into a world where details stand out, good and bad, with a clarity and force not soon forgotten.”

—David Young

"Boys Whistling Like Canaries is a collection haunted by the grim history of the 20th century, and by how its legacy continues to so troublesomely to endure. Ake tackles the most vexing subjects--among them our currentwars, the Holocaust, and Cold War totalitarianism--yet he reckons with them without resorting to bromides, polemics, or the benumbing timidity which so often afflicts the work of American poets when they seek to confront injustice. In his rangy and querulous approach, Ake recalls the work of two of our finest poets of social conscience, George Oppen and Thomas McGrath. To be linked with them is no small accomplishment."

—David Wojahn, final judge, Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry 2008