Mystic Orchards

"Make rivers flow / out of my mouth," Jonathan Koven asks of the blank page, and his poetry answers with a beautiful deluge of visions, of dreams, of the great and ancient things. Here are poems that go their own way. Here are poems that "cross state lines to reach you." Here, refreshingly, are poems that know how to be both a story and a song.

-Joseph Fasano, author of The Swallows of Lunetto

Jonathan Koven's Mystic Orchards is full of lush and palpable language, meant to be read aloud and savored. This hybrid collection weaves poetry into prose, and its form mirrors the unbound answers to the questions Koven poses: What happens at light's end, at life's end? Who do we meet there, and who could we become? And is it possible to rewind it all back to a beginning? Throughout, Koven meditates on love as both memorial and omnipresent, including both our embodied and metaphysical connections to the span of experience, from the macrocosm of nature to expertly distilled moments in his own hometown and poignant childhood memories . . . Koven ultimately suggests that the answers to all of our questions lie in listening: to the echo of self, to the love in our lives, which are both, in their own ways, infinite.

-Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, queer feast, sweet euphemism, and It Skips a Generation

"Everywhen" is a word used throughout Jonathan Koven's Mystic Orchards, an apt theme as memory flows through bloodlines and blossoms alongside crisp descriptions of the natural world. This dreamlike collection takes the reader on a journey through a catalog of intense evocations-"a map / in a January memory," "a stunted boy listening to trees," and "the cry of your hometown's train" . . . There is intense power in the delicacy of Koven's language as he alternates between poetry and ethereal prose on the border of dream and reality, ultimately reminding us that despite it all, "Life remains / in the still image."

-L.M. Camiolo, editor and founder of Impostor: A Poetry Journal