Persons Unknown

From the Publisher

“These poems are corrosive, blunt, historical as photographs we know from front-page news, but they have also the depth and tang of sweet dawn before anything has happened, before the lynchings, the blood. . . . Persons Unknown is bravely done work and Jake Adam York is, now, a necessary poet among us.”
—Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992–2004

“Elegiac and epic, these poems broaden the limits of the American imagination on the subject of Jim Crow, an era as worthy of mythologizing as the War of Independence or World War II.  I am grateful that York is applying his prodigious talent to this history and I am profoundly shaken by the result.”
—Anthony Grooms, author of Bombingham

“Never does Persons Unknown resort to simplistic political hindsight; far more, this is a fine book of poetry, a record of the wounded human heart seeking the balm of time, even in the bitter dark of time.”
—Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man

The Barnes & Noble Review

Whether reimagining a king or a forgotten murder victim, an explorer, a bystander in a lynching, all such poetry implicitly asks: What role can poetry play in common remembrance? What can it tell us about our own humanity? Can this writing make the wrongs done right? Can revisiting the site of a river that swallowed a lynched man, staring into its glassy surface, serve as memorial? In Persons Unknown, York's tortured answer is both yes and no. He's full of a paradoxical awareness of what's been erased and a plea to remember more. And in some cases, York argues that what we remember itself has to be imaginary. Standing at the place where the body of Mack Charles Parker was recovered from the Pearl River in 1959, York writes:

… But here only the drinks are listening as Ervin rises, ghosting Handy's lead and even they cannot hear how the rivers heal their quiet how they fill their scars so perfectly that remember feels like forget.

Seeking a cruelty that's quite literally hidden in plain sight, a murder that lingers just below the surface of our daily life, York asks us to remember what we "cannot hear." Suspended in such a space, York upends neater histories, and even upends himself. "Walking down the street he "catches that curve/ in a window or a windshield/ that wrecks my face/ so for a moment/ I can mistake myself/ for a redneck at the end of a joke."

The speaker of these poems is no deformed despot -- not a Richard-like murderous traitor to his throne or country. But he is a troubled narrator, one who wants to use the discord he feels within himself to stir the waters of the past, so that individuals overwhelmed by history's river don't get forgotten. He tries to recapture a story that is and isn't about him "with a memory/half my own."

--Tess Taylor