Flight Risk

DB Jonas' poems feature a graceful intelligence. This carefully crafted literature of attention springs from penetrating analysis of everyday experience informed by an extensive reading life. Resonances of Dante and Rousseau, Fitzgerald, Stevens, and so many others are woven into meditations that explore the complexities of sensation, perception, time and memory. The poetry of Flight Risk demonstrates how these all combine to produce impressions that linger, images "that yet / fresh images beget" upon the page and in the reader's mind.

-Joseph Acquisto, University of Vermont, author of Poetry's Knowing Ignorance

Whether through the narrow lanes of a Moroccan town, or following "the clacking heel, / the slender foot, the measured step" of a seminal poet through the corridors of her poetry, the poems of Flight Risk are invitations. They invite us to contemplate the exotic character of the "distant world" we live in, someplace far beyond "the one we think in." My favorite among DB Jonas' provocative titles is Knowledge is Always Carnal; page after page, he substantiates this claim, and however far from home their insights and imagery may deposit us, his poems keep us firmly grounded in poetic tradition, always within earshot of Rilke, Yeats, or the Chinese Classics. Flight Risk never fails to endow the insubstantial with substance, and to pulse with the lived life, in which, as Eliot wrote, "approach to the meaning restores the experience."

-Johnny Payne, author of Midnight Sutra, Ostraca, Heaven of Ashes, and Vassal.

Flight Risk reads like a meditation, a musing at the crossroads-always erudite and darkly baroque. The language of its poetry carries you as music or water does. Just as stepping into a river for a second time will present to us a different river and a different self, every rereading of these poems will offer up new music. Each time through, the work surprises us with its richness, with new layers of meaning.

-Anna Potter, founding editor of The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal