JASON IRWIN

BLACK AND TANNED
for Eric
Black and tanned we hurly-burlied through the ship swaying of streets and doorways, and maze of cityscapes, amid the sweat of clinking glass laughs, propelled by a taste for the tragic. In a bitter swill of blurred anecdotes and redundancies we have talked of heroes, villains and the sacredness of socks.

The Transparency of Windows

By Valerie Lawson
from Off the Coast, Winter 2009



Watering the Dead is Jason Irwin’s first book and winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award from Pavement Saw Press. Essentially about discovery, the book opens with “Nothing I Thought I Knew," when John Lennon was shot and the nine year old narrator becomes aware of himself in a much larger world. Irwin carefully draws the line between what was to what is now and invites us to step across.

Nothing I thought I knew before mattered
that somehow I was saved.

If “Nothing I Thought I Knew” catches the child up to the past, “First Communion” prepares the child for the future, ready to be let into the world in a borrowed suite the color of grandfather’s Pontiac:

I knew it was only a matter of time
before I walked on water, healed the sick,
died the hero’s death.

In “Main Street,” we glimpse the sharp edged transparency of windows, where we see faces of the children moved on, but still trap…

Link to my first book: "Watering the Dead" winner of the 2006/2007 Transcontinental Poetry Award. Published by Pavement Saw Press, 2008.



Biography of Hans Krusi

http://www.edlingallery.com/dynamic/new_artist_bio.asp?ArtistID=8

The painting on the cover is by Hans Krusi.