Books by Jeff Latosik

Like the fever dream of a modern Odysseus, Safely Home Pacific Western is an electric rumination on the moment of departure, of squaring those provisional instances of settlement with the ingenuity and cunning that it takes to persevere. Latosik's tour package journeys into ruined stretches of the rural US and Ontario mine country, across the English Channel in a hot-air balloon, into the flight paths of fish hurled across Northern Territory Australia by a water spout, and even to the far, blinking orbit of a Navstar satellite. Neither safe nor conciliatory, these poems peer deep into the notion of human progress to reckon with the only seeming certainty: that in a poem, as in our lives, we are done and undone by the emergent element we cannot control.