In this debut collection, Jesse Nathan matches an exquisite feeling for the music of lines and sentences with his profound explorations of the idea of home.
With verbal precision and abiding sympathy, Nathan\'s poems announce a capacious and deeply compelling new voice in American letters..
In a style somehow both lavish and plainspoken, in free verse and inherited forms, Eggtooth takes us from straw-bale fortresses in the hayloft, from fishing in streams and days so hot the blank road shimmers as the heat drives you out of your straw-frail mind, to the respite and loneliness of a far-off city plaza, to the waves in their folding at the edge where an ocean comes boiling onto sand.
Ecology, family, history, sexuality, and poetry itself are his subjects, but in all these matters, Nathan\'s rich formal imagination travels our fundamental feelings of alienation and belonging.
They follow an unusual and passionate boy from his childhood on a wheat farm in the watershed of the Running Turkey Creek in rural southcentral Kansas -- the land was always the solace -- to his life years later in a coastal city.
Like an eggtooth, Nathan\'s poems are often figures for birth, for the violence of birth and, in his case, rebirth.
Shortly after the bird hatches, the tooth disappears.
The book\'s title comes from the word for a bit of cartilage on a baby bird\'s beak, a growth that helps it break out of the egg.
In this debut collection, Jesse Nathan matches an exquisite feeling for the music of lines and sentences with his profound explorations of the idea of home
