not of this earth, by J. M. Baker

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

not of this earth performs an ongoing search for a world which disintegrates, falls out of reach, and must continuously be remade. At stake is a search for embodiment, a search for connection, a search for self and time. In these poems, the past, present, and future layer into one another like fragments blending, made whole, made personal.

Nostalgia, a pandemic, and a future in crisis converge to reveal how the speaker in these poems can open up to what it means to be alive despite all its precarities and vulnerabilities. In this collapsing of time and identity, grief and love collide and intersect, each having to find itself within the other. It is there, these poems discover, that we will be, for however long, made real.

J. M. Baker received his MFA from UC San Diego. His work has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, The Antioch Review, Phoebe, and Epiphany, among other places. He currently teaches in the Boston area, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and large dog.