Cover Songs

In his latest collection, Jordan Stempleman emerges from the seasons of life into a new community with other voices and a new wisdom in his own. The first three sequences, the cover songs, filter the modalities of three writers (Joyce Mansour, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the old Jordan Stempleman) through the tuned deviance of the new Jordan Stempleman. Voices need voices. People need various dark fantasies to call them a day. The final long poem "Off Days" shakes the snow off the cherry trees into a fresh uplift.