Brave Disguises

by Gray Jacobik

A poet with an artist's eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp's terribly surreal life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover's - or a mother's - secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy. from The Power Outage Visible from an upstairs window, the cloud-caught glow of an end-of-summer carnival goes suddenly black as all else. Must be children stuck on the Ferris wheel. My palms slide down banisters to the candle drawer. Nothing to do but go to bed. The world is as dark as it ever was. Wind is awash in the music of trees. We rest in one another's arms but there's no spark between us tonight, nothing to kindle, so I voice a memory and you voice another, and we go back and forth like this, surveying in deep enclosing darkness, the turns circumstance and promises have given us.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 2002