I can’t help but see hope for my own poetic future in the development between these two books, watching Jackson deftly weave his interests into these complex topics in a way that feels mature and considered.

The organization of many of the poems is confounding and the line work isn’t as clean as it could be, but it is a personal book, a processing of generations of trauma delivered in a confident series of poems. The lines flow together, with rounded vowels and soft T’s quieting the violence of the rest of the poem. Here, we see the child Jackson mourning, both with his cousin and for his own missing experiences. In “Cry Uncle” (6), we are focused on the death of Jackson’s uncle and the ways he and his cousin used fantasy to escape the difficult men in their lives. However, the poems demonstrate an evolution and maturity of language, deftly moving between perspectives and tones, imbuing each with a unique voice. The heroic preoccupations of Metropolis still persist in this second work: an epigraph from Incredible Hulk #1, a poem named after a Star Trek film, and trawls through bars in Korea. It often feels like she is haunting this book, with multiple poems dedicated to or titled after her, and the poetically reworked interviews reveal in her a sadness and melancholy that endures throughout the book. The poems are as evenly constructed as they are natural, his mother’s syntax preserved. His mother’s life, and no small amount of her personality, unfolds from these interview poems, each feeling like it reveals a new aspect of this woman, but never her whole self. Now, a decade after Jackson wrote Metropolis, and five years after I read it, Jackson has released Origin Story, where he seeks to explore many of the questions that Metropolis overlooked.įramed around a series of poems crafted as erasures of conversations Jackson recorded with his mother, Origin Story focuses on the clash of cultures within his family, from his Korean grandmother, to his mixed-race mother, to his own childhood growing up in the primarily white midwest. Looking back on the book, and myself, there is certainly an immaturity, not solely because of the subject matter, but in the voice of the speaker attempting to bury the questions surrounding the reality of his language and experience within the fictional landscape. The book is an exploration of Jackson’s midwestern childhood and the fundamental role the tales of heroes like the Flash and Superman played in it. I read Gary Jackson’s first book, Missing You Metropolis, when I was twenty-one, still getting my feet under me as an adult and poet, and was awed at the idea that you could mix poetry and pop culture at all, let alone with actual poetic skill.

Missing you metropolis poems