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DB Jonas

DB Jonas is an American poet living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. His work has been widely published in journals throughout the US and UK, Ireland, Holland and Israel. He is the author of two collections, Tarantula Season and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and the upcoming Flight Risk, Poems and Translations (Kelsay Books, February 2025).

The lyrical and intellectual sophistication of these poems accomplishes the promise of all important art by reintroducing us to the luminous richness of the world while encountering the inconvenient stranger always present at the heart of the familiar. Alain Toumayan, The University of Notre Dame

In the tradition of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, DB Jonas has constructed a soaring architecture in verse. Joel Van Valin, Publisher of Whistling Shade and author of The White Forest

Poetry of an astonishing cultural and sensory range, a sustained musicality, a fusion of observation and introspection, carried by a consciousness that resists faith yet is haunted by the intangible. Nothing else I have seen recently makes as plausible a claim to continue the tradition of Rilke and Wallace Stevens. Esther Cameron, Founding Editor and Publisher, The Deronda Review

...however far from home their insights and imagery may deposit us, his poems keep us firmly grounded in poetic tradition, always within earshot of Rilke, Yeats, or the Chinese Classics. Flight Risk never fails to endow the insubstantial with substance, and to pulse with the music of lived life. Johnny Payne, author of Midnight Sutra, Ostraca, Heaven of Ashes, and Vassal

The language of its poetry carries you as music or water does…Every rereading of these poems will offer up new music. Each time through, the work surprises us with its richness, with new layers of meaning. Anna Potter, Founding Editor of The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal

Resonances of Dante and Rousseau, Fitzgerald, Stevens, and so many others are woven into meditations that explore the complexities of sensation, perception, time and memory. The poetry of Flight Risk demonstrates how these all combine to produce impressions that linger, images “that yet / fresh images beget” upon the page and in the reader’s mind. Joseph Acquisto, University of Vermont, author of Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance