We are pleased to welcome poet Jesse Nathan to the California Book Club this Thursday to discuss the poetry collection Praise with its author, Robert Hass, and CBC host John Freeman. Nathan is an accomplished poet whose first collection, Eggtooth, was published in 2023 with a foreword by Hass. This volume won the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry and was a finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize, and the Eric Hoffer Award’s Medal Provocateur.
Nathan, a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series, has published poetry in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, the Kenyon Review, and BOMB. He has had criticism and essays appear in the New York Times, Threepenny Review, and Tin House. He is also a translator whose work has been published in Poetry. Currently a lecturer at UC Berkeley, Nathan has taught literature and writing workshops at Stanford University, Kenyon College, Bread Loaf, Fresno Pacific University, the 92Y, and 826 Valencia.
Nathan grew up in both Northern California and Kansas, and the differences between the two places come up in some of his work, including this essay in the New York Times. But it’s the sound, the striking and beautiful musicality of Nathan’s poetry, that most distinguishes it. He uses to great effect alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme. In the third-person poem “The Long Distance,” about a son’s call home to his family in another state, Nathan writes, “Sunday, in his grandmother’s time, had been the day / You went visiting. Noontime news, topped with beet borsht / And pickled pigs’ feet, cottage cheese stuffed in pancakes— / And schputting, silly talk—and coffee. His art / With his hopes had conspired to conduct him / Many states away, but even now when / Sunday’s here he calls his kin.”
The poem builds with small alliterative and down-to-earth details—“Noontime” and “news,” “beet” and “borsht,” “pickled” and “pigs” and “pancakes,” among others. But then there’s the assonance of “stuffed” and the “silly talk” of “schputting,” the gentle echo created by “talk” and “art.” Throughout, there’s an atmosphere of old-timey “visiting,” a feeling magnified by the content of the poem, in which the speaker talks first to his father about weather, then to his mother about butchering hens. And yet, too, the poem evokes the tremendous distance between son and parents, a gap or disconnect between them. The poet writes, “The son, not really sure what then to say, / Says an iconic radio tower, from where he sits, presents / Like a comb jelly.” And then the parents, seemingly unsure what to say to this bit of whimsy, raise the phone to catch the sounds of the train, a sound their son would be familiar with.
Some of Nathan’s other poems follow the same pattern—a melodic sound married to earthy details. In “Between States,” for instance, the speaker remembers his childhood. He says, “I’m imagining / my relatives soon flooding in / with cabinet and poppyseed, / bonnet and spring tooth, hope chest and hedgerow, / their book full of martyrs, dear as a mirror / and quilts made in the drunkards’ path / by hands that wouldn’t hold a drink.” Again, there’s attention to sound with the pairing of “soon” and “flooding” and “poppyseed” and “bonnet,” “hope chest” and “hedgerow.” The crisp but homey details you want to sink into.
We hope you’ll join us for what’s sure to be a wonderful conversation among poets Hass, Nathan, and Freeman.•
Join us on April 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Hass will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Nathan to discuss Praise. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
IN A FALLEN WORLD
John Freeman writes about the elegiac beauty of Robert Hass’s Praise. —Alta
WAR CORRESPONDENT
Author and critic Lydia Kiesling reviews Devi Laskar’s Midnight, at the War. —Alta
RECKLESS ASCENT
Terry McDonell writes about the early years of Rolling Stone magazine as described in Peter Richardson’s Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine. —Alta
BOOK TOUR
Richardson is on tour for Brand New Beat. On Wednesday, April 15, at 6 p.m., he will discuss the book at Readers’ Books in Sonoma. —Readers’ Books
LEGENDARY VOICES
The outdoor culture magazine Mountain Gazette turns 60 this year, and it will publish two oversize editions in celebration (it has also released a print anthology, Print Ain’t Dead). —Mountain Gazette
POETIC INVENTIVENESS
Alta Journal contributor Jeff Gordinier reviews Dean Young’s posthumous collection, Creature Feature. —New York Times
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