Joseph’s new book of poetry is out NOW! Mirror Box is published by our friends at Main Street Rag. You can pick up your copy NOW! Go!
The spry, surprising, fearless poems in Joseph Kerschbaum’s Mirror Box have so much love in them that the truth has to take to its corner. Tornadoes, death, mutilation, and a god-like force that loves to flex its destroying magic, these are all here in poems that put their arms across our shoulders. We may live in a mirror box, trapped by seeing only ourselves, but knowing that is what makes us completely human, crippled beings who can feel what is not there, what was taken away.
-Roger Mitchel, author of Reason’s Dream and Delicate Bait
Formally accomplished, moving between registers of plain speech and profound lyricism, the poems in Joseph Kerschbaum’s book Mirror Box consider the accidents inherent in life and death, as well as the almost unbearable accident of being someone who remains. The body has many ways of knowing and grieving, grappling and living. “I would show you / where it hurts /but when I point / to the pain / I point at air.” This book is ultimately a testament to the vast power of the imagination acknowledging that what the imagination sets to, burns.
-Laura Cronk, author of Having Been an Accomplice and Ghost Hour
A mirror box is used in therapy to alleviate phantom limb pain. Through this deft metaphor, Joseph Kerschbaum’s Mirror Box explores an internal world of ghosts, phantoms, and shadows that beg for light – a world of self and others adrift in an existential puzzle. In the title poem, Kerschbaum writes “Only when I look / directly in the mirror / am I free of my phantoms.” Kerschbaum’s talent is looking directly into that mirror.
-Barry Harrison, publisher of Tipton Poetry Journal