Greetings, friends! Joseph’s new book of poetry is out NOW!
You can pick up a copy of Learning How to Drown — RIGHT HERE! Go, go, go.
In Learning How to Drown, Joseph Kerschbaum does not hesitate to take us right into the heart and “belly of the rusted beast.” And that beast is the familiar paradox of loving a place while being forced to radically accept all of its shortcomings. This uniquely Midwestern paradox and ethos is what tethers all of Kerschbaum’s tender and ramshackle confessions together. In the first part of the book’s titular poem, the author writes, “I am a tourist / wandering through lives in progress…” That kind of interior self-reflection is the product of an expert observation—someone who is uniquely attuned to the people inhabiting a place. The people in Kerschbaum’s Midwest are full of heart and quiet lives. But their lives resound with profound epiphanies that “they still hear / scratching at the back porch door / years later.” Kerschbaum is a poet skilled enough to risk sentimentality to give us what we desire—a chance to relive the moments that shaped us, ineffably and forever.
~John McCarthy, author of Scared Violent Like Horses
Joseph Kerschbaum writes these dark little epics of small-town, blue-collar, midwestern life. His chapbook, Learning How to Drown, rings with authenticity; this is a sensitive, mature poet attuned to people and places, and the terrors and frustrations brewing beneath the surface. Kerschbaum captures broken lives and dead ends both honestly and compassionately, and his poems stayed with me long after I had finished reading.
~Justin Lacour, Editor-in-Chief, Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry
Learning How to Drown is unapologetically Midwest. There’s beauty in the drudgery and harshness of lessons learned here, just as there is in Kerschbaum’s poetry.
This collection manages to make the mundanity of life extraordinary, almost mythical (as in Into Darkness, where the climbing of a grain silo becomes the ascension of a monolith into the untrodden realm of “growing up”). Instead of ink, the poet’s blood, sweat, and tears are spilled here (as they are through a hard day’s work in Detasseling), and Midwest life–farmland, fields, train tracks, Main Street drags, choice made out of boredom and wanderlust–is alive and vibrant from cover to cover.
~Curtis Deeter, Editor-in-Chief, Of Rust and Glass
This field of poetry doesn’t need a mouth to swallow you. Its yellow stoplight blinks, your only warning to slow down to appreciate these stark and introspective jagged lines that aren’t afraid to sketch their master’s imperfections. Kerschbaum’s definitive statements weave and grow, leading you to unexpected trails through time and familiar/unfamiliar spaces.
~Jenny Kalahar, Editor-in-Chief, Last Stanza Poetry Journal