EARS

Jared Stanley’s new book, Ears, is a manifesto of interdependence and susceptibility, a theory of the senses, and a deliberate sequence of jokes about lyric address. Actually, it’s a book of poems about daily life, listening and looking, among friends… The poet has recently moved from the Bay Area to the Nevada desert, and the book, like Stanley’s previous book The Weeds, sets up a constant interplay between these locations. But while The Weeds drew its intensity from a solitary speaker obsessively investigating and sometimes ventriloquizing his nonhuman surroundings, Ears (as the title suggests) is always socially situated, negotiating a path among human and nonhuman neighbors. Maybe for this reason the poems are more circuitous, the speaker more persistently, often hilariously, self-conscious.

He’s a writer who values his sensory perceptions. The poems in Ears are full of smells, sounds and tactile sensations. And the book title is reflective of that recurring theme.

Jared Stanley is a wizard, and a master of the garden path sentence. In the latest collection of his, Ears, he invites the reader to listen to the resonances each word in his spells make as they follow their somatic path through the line break and dissolve into dreamsong. When Stanley creates these marvelous sentences he welds together the affects of sound, the registers of the eye, and the emotive responses of desert landscapes his speakers find themselves in.

In EARS, Jared Stanley uses language to try, as much as one can try, to posit the self onto an invisible line. One where what is sensed, felt and remembered, is met at a crossroads between what the world gives him, how he lets it in, and how he makes it public. Sometimes that line is tender, sometimes it’s contemplative, and sometimes it’s interrogated.

Jared Stanley with Brian Teare