my poem "On the Road to Bushmills" in the latest edition of The Honest Ulsterman

https://humag.co/poetry/on-the-road-to-bushmills 

The History of Our Vagrancies . Copies available $14 including shipping. Click on the PayPal link below.

https://www.paypal.com/instantcommerce/checkout/Q4655EYRBTZKQ                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                    

We are shaped, each of us, by our own accidents, what Jason Irwin, in his gritty account, calls the vagaries, tracing his life in the rustbelt parentheses where “everything we’ve lost is gathered”: friends, family, the disjecta of abandoned rooms and factories, and most hauntingly, the clubfoot cynosure of the poet’s now severed limb, sympathetic to the surrounding music. “Like the song the dead sing,/or the cry of a newborn . . . the history of our comings and goings.” Poem after poem, Irwin stands his painful ground. His book shows us how the pivot foot gets planted and that circumference comes from that. ~Robert Gibb

With every line of Jason Irwin’s poems, our love for life is sharpened—even while those lines recount the losses, the heartaches, the hauntings, the treacheries of time. Here is “that dark, dreamy other world.” And here is comfort, companionship, longing, and then suddenly an acute sorrow that somehow makes us want more of the whole tragic beautiful thing, more of it, more… ~Jean LeBlanc

"My father asks me to go to church//and write the hymn numbers on a sheet of yellow paper./He read about a woman in Michigan who won the Powerball this way." Family love is all the more real for being volatile, spirituality deeper for being fueled at times by Black Mollies and Budweiser. Jason Irwin has created a world of visionary contingency and immanence. A History of Our Vagrancies is exemplary, a keeper and a gem.  ~D. Nurkse

Over the course of three books (including this one) and two chapbooks, Jason Irwin has been developing an operatic account of disabled lives in a disabled city, Dunkirk in upstate New York. Once again, this latest book is studded with very fine poems—"Among Strangers," "County Fair," "Saint Max of the First Ward," "Kierkegaard, Dying"—that speak truthfully and musically of personal failures and social despair. Anyone who has trouble understanding why the white working class votes for Trump should read Jason Irwin's "Codgers." These expertly crafted narratives have acquired a new lyrical intensity in such poems as "Exile" and "Chopin's Heart," to which long and wide meditation has given fresh imagery and imaginative leaps. The title poem "The History of Our Vagrancies" brings a grand historical sweep to the portrait of this city. The poems that work less well for me in this collection shade too much into prose, sentimentality, or finger-wagging, but the number of hits is unreasonably high. Dunkirk, NY has found its troubadour. I can't wait to see a grand distillation from these books into a single majestic work. A song cycle, anyone? ~Jee Leong Koh

"Afterwards" in Vox Populi 9/27/22

https://voxpopulisphere.com/2022/09/27/jason-irwin-afterwards/ 

Kris Collins' "Roundabout Trace" Book Launch Reading, Sunday, September 25th 2pm @ Trace Brewing

https://www.facebook.com/events/751415252617628?ref=newsfeed 

Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry & Prose

https://cityofasylum.org/event/litfest-pittsburgh-live-ability-encounters-in-poetry-prose/?fbclid=IwAR3ok0zFb5GNbP7fpJb2Xlv2FRTdp4CIlfuGI3xD2Z1ftUw7tiQITTxVF2s 

Reading at Chautauqua with Mark Altschuler

 

AUTHORS' HOUR READING SERIES @ CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTE

 I'll be reading some poems & talking with Mark Altschuler at the final Authors' Hour Readings @ Chautauqua Institute on Thursday, August 25th. 12:15 p.m. • Alumni Hall Porch.

Authors’ Hour Readings will be live streamed on Zoom & available later on the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center YouTube channel.

Click here to join the Zoom meeting

Meeting ID: 830 2691 1587

Passcode: 113819

ZOEGLOSSIA NAMES 2022 FELLOWS

http://www.zoeglossia.org/2022-fellows?fbclid=IwAR3uzPm52XUnOk2Ive0_j-z9g_55zyM8sawQ2OeVjyE2VofxDUBHR4ac9hA 

The Writing Life: Gatherer's Blog, Spring, 2022

https://wordgathering.com/vol16/issue1/gatherers-blog/ 

Poem of the Week: Zoeglossia

https://www.zoeglossia.org/poem-of-the-week?fbclid=IwAR2132Nj5c5I7mQB6slXDVSKzL

SMEEUYqTRFNkVqieyFtwMkUsMdjbNDQLY

Poetry Reading at Brillobox. Baldinger, Collins, Irwin, Left, Rudolph, Silsbe. March 26th 7:30pm

https://www.facebook.com/events/924301114945866/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22your_upcoming_events_unit%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22bookmark%22%7D]%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D