JP Grasser’s poems are rooted in the “mammoth sense” of direct experience. They are immersed in the physical world while also wryly suspicious of language’s tendency to objectify nature into abstract conceptualizations. In compressed, sculpted language and taut line trajectories, Grasser’s poems resist the desire to make a memento mori of the natural world. Instead, Grasser crafts a language for nature that is relational rather than reifying, as in the poem “Pathetic Fallacy,” where our desire to construct the physical world in our own image is re-envisioned as an “errand of covetousness.” I appreciate how Grasser’s poems imagine a world based on mutuality and collaboration, a world in which our co-existence with the land is not a symbol of anything but itself.
Read “Pathetic Fallacy” by JP Grasser >>
Read “Heavy Machinery” by JP Grasser >>