The Inanity of Music and Wings

In his eagerly awaited poetic debut, Zachary Michael Jack takes his readers on mind-bending, mytho-poetic travels from modern-day rural Mexico to the American Great Plains of the early century and back again. Employing an unlikely list of dramatis personae ranging from Tom Selleck to Nikita Krushchev, Jack's many-voiced story-in-poems follows his narrator's solitary stay in a Mexican mission and the heart-rending dialogue with Bird-an anthropomorphized alter-ego and trickster figure-that ensues. By turns, sad, funny, and wise, The Inanity of Music and Wings is both inimitable and delightfully uncanny-a wonderbeast of a collection part American Gothic, part Don Quixote, and wholly original.

~~~~~~Bio: Zachary Michael Jack is the author of the fine arts poetry chapbook The Story of Grief and the editor of two previous essay collections: Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom and The Furrow and Us. His poetry has earned him the Prentice Hall Poetry Prize, a nomination for a Pushcart (Best of the Small Presses) Prize, and writing residencies at New York's prestigious Blue Mountain Center and Ireland's Tyrone Guthrie Centre, among others. A native of Iowa, where his family has farmed since before the Civil War, Jack is an assistant professor of English at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois and the director-founder of Iowa School of Lost Arts for children.