Jordan Makant

ISBN: 978-1-59948-653-6, 36 pages, $11

Release Date: September 5, 2017

Jordan Makant is a student at Lenoir-Rhyne University (Dec. 2017). He is one of three co-founders of the Hickory Playground, a non-profit theatre company dedicated to raising awareness and finanical support for the arts throughout the greater Hickory, North Carolina community. He recieved Lenoir-Rhyne’s First Place Poetry Award in the spring of 2016, and has been published in Rat’s Ass Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Main Street Rag, and Kakalak 2017.

Debut collections of poetry are almost always exciting if for no other reason than because they present a new voice in the world of poetry. Often, these first efforts stand for years afterwards as the new author’s rawest, most honest, unpolished, and original work. Only time will tell how the poems in Jordan Makant’s first collection stack up against those he will (most certainly) compile later, but compared to collections by much more seasoned poets, these are already craftily formed and satisfyingly realized. More refreshingly, they also reveal something new: a voice that is simultaneously comfortable with the precision of a Mark Strand or a Robert Bly and the effusive stream of consciousness of Bukowski and Dobyns. Drawing from a wide range of models and mentors, these poems are real and surreal, imagistic and philosophical, familiar and novel, narrative and lyrical. Most of all, however, they are fresh. They feel like nothing we’ve quite read before and something that can reach us all. I can think of no one who will not enjoy these poems. –Scott Owens

PORCH SWING

We held each other dear then,
hesitating like frightened rabbits,
twitching, afraid of hawks
we knew would one day come
but still longing to be held,
still braving predators
for the sake of something
we could only call love.
It didn’t matter that we knew
we would lose. It didn’t matter
that hawking season was near.
As the porch swing rocked us
gently back and forth,
our legs found a rhythm
and we were encompassed
by the aura of an October night;
the only thing that mattered then
was your head on my shoulder,
my arms around you, our lips
finding each other the first time.

OAKWOOD CEMETERY, LATE AUTUMN

I would like to apologize to the man
whose grave we lay on that night,
or not apologize, exactly, but thank him
for the Southern hospitality he showed
two kids too in love to know the truth
about life, love, how nothing lasts forever;
even as we stained his final resting place
with the plight of a love hardly won,
our coupling was undisturbed,
blessed by the quiet indifference of a world
sound asleep, dreaming of two lost kids
lying together in an old cemetery,
learning how to love, looking up at the stars,
wondering if, somewhere amongst the void,
someone was looking back at us,
an insignificant dot in the distant sky,
meaningless and yet so full of life.

BEST WORST THING

Perhaps the worst thing about losing you is
the realization that my first reader is gone.
Perhaps Bukowski would be proud
of my graduation to true writer-hood –
after all, I don’t have to read it to my wife
or my girlfriend or my boyfriend
or my parents or to anybody at all anymore;
perhaps that means I am finally ready
to sit down in front of that selfish screen
and start writing. Perhaps
real art comes from the pain
I thought I had felt but actually hadn’t
until now. I’ve felt it now.
Perhaps now I will be good enough –
not for you, but maybe for this next draft
I no longer have anyone to show.