Rough Sea
“This world is a dangerous place in so many ways—and this book doesn’t hesitate to elaborate the dangers—but it is also full of wild apples, wild dreams, a thousand regrets that turn into a thousand joys.”
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The winner of the 2024 Grayson Books Poetry Contest is J.P. White for his collection Rough Sea.
Jim Moore, author of Prognosis
“The seas in Rough Sea are rough indeed, but also strangely inviting. They call out to J.P. White, and he is there to heed the call…”What Was It Like Being in Human Form?” White asks. It’s a question he comes back to again and again, sometimes attempting to answer it, but just as often letting it be the central question at the heart of the book. Rough Sea is a handbook that sometimes shows us how to navigate the rough seas of this world, but also how to let go of all navigation and be carried away in amazement. I love this book.”
Chase Twichell, author of Things as It Is
“Rough Sea is a collection of poems with a big range. Their meticulous craftsmanship and vividly rendered imagery produce rich sequences of small moments made numinous and memorable. Elastic and expansive, the voice reveals its intimacy with the natural world in all its beauty and cruelty while equally at home in the human realm, also beautiful and cruel. In language that travels easily between snappy colloquialism and more formal phrasings, the poems seem boundless in their curiosity. A subtle shadow of hindsight falls over them whether their subject is the politics of distant conflicts or closeups of human love and death. This worldliness gives them a powerful, authentic authority. The most important questions are unanswerable, and these poems know that. They raise the questions anyway and allow the answers to haunt the space around them. This is the work of a poet unafraid to tackle the complexities of our increasingly crazy world, and he does so with verve and distinction.”
About J.P. White
J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry in over a hundred publications. A highly acclaimed, award-winning writer, White pushes beyond the boundaries of the lyric/narrative tradition to let more of the flux and wonder of the human condition rush in.