McCall's poems are stirring because they stretch pithy
observations--"It is hard to sell rebirth in a world of ice"--and
an exhaustive knowledge of mythologies tautly over the speaker's arduous
search for meaning in his existence and ours. Where are we to turn when
our ears ring with God's laughter and when the gods will share little of
their courage and less of their knowledge? These poems question urgently
and bravely, as if the questioning and the stories themselves are the only
fragments we can shore against the ruins.
--Leah Nielsen, author of No Magic
This is a book of inheritances, cycles, natures, mythologies:
all real, and all imagined. There is no navigating McCall's oceans, in
which the deeply personal is also the deeply mythic. Here, all heroes shape-shift,
all gods trick; myths intrigue, deceive and give no answers. As he writes,
it is "the dark forces that chain the universe together." We
are to "watch the man who was born of lightning flood the world with
light," though whether that light is a fire that warms or one that
burns the house down is anyone's guess. In this funny, moody, idiosyncratic
book, we are all busted superheroes. We are all gods, all frail, all pieces
of the very puzzle we try eternally to solve.
--Ashley McWaters, author Whitework
The mythologically-savvy tales of Jason McCall's premier
poetry collection, Silver, illumine both the
halls of Valhalla and the land of Alabama, where gods and men wrestle and
tease and wound and fall, cohabitating furiously and famously (as they're
inclined to do, according to McCall, when given the all too human space
to do so). The poems are tight, gut-honest, fresh, wildly entertaining,
and wise as hell. They're intimate, irreverent, unself-conscious, deeply
spiritual, and lucent with humanity. "I keep trying to catch the gods
and hold/them, even though it always ends/with me choking on their bones/and
spitting them back up into heaven." This is a gorgeous book, "of
shadows and ether," yet grounded in the tangible, where "We sat
together/and watched firebirds cross the sky./We couldn't decide if we
loved them/more because they rose or because they fell."
--Maureen Seaton,
author of Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen