Laser, Jessica: The Goner School

Description

University of Iowa Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 27, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Jessica Laser has given her generation a voice and a name in her masterful, funny and heartbreaking third collection, The Goner School. Members of this school, despairing and hopeful, count themselves among the self-aware, trauma-informed inheritors of a warming, warring planet. They come honestly by their goldfish attention spans and financial precarity. They were formed by artistic and religious traditions before tradition became taboo. If they work from homes they do not own, did they ever grow up? They may marry whom they choose, but what, even, is intimacy? How do they reconcile their daily joys with the horrors on the news? Childhood, the gym, plant medicine ceremonies, PhD programs, Jews, evangelicals, everyone you’ve slept with, Lake Michigan, the Bay Area, William James and Taylor Swift may seem incongruous, but they all take place in one world from which, try as we might, there is no escape. Look at a still of a person running and you’ll see that there’s no difference between running toward and running from, especially when the planet is round. In compelling, playful, narrative poems, The Goner School documents one woman’s attempt to love the people and things of this world, in all their irreconcilable differences, knowing that she has no other choice.