Jonathan Koven’s incoming fiction novella Below Torrential Hill is the second place winner of the 2020 Electric Eclectic Novella Prize, expected winter 2021. Eagerly anticipating its release, it’s encouraged you familiarize yourself with Koven’s tender and lyrical voice. His debut, titled Palm Lines, is a spellbinding and intimate collection of poems, now available from Toho Publishing.
Present
Walk to the edge of the beach. Lift your arms.
The spray, salt flying,
wind blowing, gasps
as if the moment itself nearly
never happened.At night, they pass faster than the zip of dragonflies. A train station, you are. Operate, channel, historize, vanish.
Everything you do is the receiving and translating of different prayers. You don’t know who says them.
In this moment, skyscrapers rise like titans
in pale pre-dawn guise,
gale sibilant like closed windows whistling,
New York’s final sound. Ocean falls
from the sky, crashes sidewalks, rolls
and fills the slits between every crack in the street,
every alley, into every window, every
mouth and eye and ear and the lines of every palm—
the key which unlocks your chimera,
and you may finally awaken. Or
would you rather stay?The rim of a silver circle in the sky, the center of her chest, the way a universe puckers its lips and softly coos itself to sleep.
Love crawls over your heart. Maybe you stumbled into a dream, and then, into this body.
“These are ecstatic poems which wrestle with surrender. Even as they reach outward, they are reflecting back, mapping the story of our own hands.” —David Keplinger, author of Another City, winner of 2019 UNT Rilke Prize
“Palm Lines is an epic, a journey . . . These poems read like the work of a storyteller, speaking innately human truths over the metaphysical fire.” —Shannon Frost Greenstein, author of More. and Pray for Us Sinners
“In Palm Lines, everything is humongous because of the gravity of the beauty and emotion observed—and language is the catharsis . . . This accessible collection offers the reader an opportunity to take a deep breath and reflect.” —Sean Lynch, editor of Serotonin