Description:
At the core of Rogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobs's debut poetry collection, is a mystery: Was the poet's father abducted by aliens as a teenager? From this uncanny family lore spins a gravitational field of theory, grief, and imagination, spurring speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds: What are the limits of understanding between two alien anatomies, between two unlike minds? Are we, after all, finally alone?
In poems that continually veer from play to reverence, from body horror to bodily delight, encounters with bed bugs and cuttlefish appear side by side with retro gaming and phantom light. A brother living with delusions turns toward the sky. The poet also peers skyward in search of connection--across family lines, across the body's borders, across galaxies. Outer space becomes a metaphorical terrain where queer desire and spiritual longing collide. Just as Agent Mulder's iconic X-Files poster declares "I WANT TO BELIEVE," so do these poems ache to trust in something more--extraterrestrial life, divine presence, intimacy.
Jacobs's electrifying collection offers readers a singular voice attuned to the strangeness of living now--where science fiction and memory, tenderness and dissociation, belief and doubt pulse in tangled orbit. With wit, vision, and formal inventiveness, Rogue Astronaut charts a course through the mysterious and the intimate, inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting across distance, time, and the alien terrain of self.
Review Quotes:
"In Mitchell Jacobs's stunning debut, Rogue Astronaut, we're invited to ask what the future holds for us in this age of 'the earth's vendetta / against flesh, which it punishes / and punishes then decomposes.' These poems are meditations on the nature of the body as we struggle with our corporeal pleasures and failures even while imagining some future deliverance of a newly forged incorporeal self. These remarkable poems of human reckoning with fear and desire stand at the intersection of David Bowie's Space Oddity and Frank Bidart's The Book of the Body. The raw inner spaces of Jacobs's poems are by turns both luminous and ominous, yet his vision is deeply intimate, and the universe he travels remains irreducibly human." -David St. John