Jorn Ake Knihy

Boys Whistling like Canaries is a journey through the political cruelty of the past century. The connecting thread is the relationship between father and son, parent and child, and the complexity of basic survival in the face of the annihilation wrought by inhuman disregard. Sweeping through a landscape framed by religion and literature, the poems argue that history has consistently failed to inoculate us against war and oppression against the tyranny of governments who turn on their people, people who turn on their neighbors even as the voice behind the poems refuses to lose hope for the eventuality of Lincoln's "better angles of our nature.""

Asleep in the Lightning Fields records observations of memory made as it works inefficiently to hold onto the present firmly and seeks to make concrete those momentary flashes of sense in an otherwise empty expanse. These moments are transitory and peripheral, and the language used to describe them rests heavily on the luck of irony and the bite of ambiguity. The final poem sleeps only fitfully with the awareness that even the most definitive elements of the self are as easily lost to memory as one’s own name."You hook the hoof with a looptied to the hitch of the tractorand drag him from the pastureto the barn.Even though you know he is deadand it doesn't really matter anymoreyou think about the skin scraped offfrom the dark underside and wonderwhere it goes."-"Hauling the Dead Horse", from  Asleep in the Lightning Fields

"The figurative subtlety and range of these poems made this book an imaginative feast. Throughout, I had a sense that I was being presented the story of a life by means of a deeper language, as if Jorn Ake has figured out how to speak directly through the feelings that attach to actions, objects and memories. With a work this metaphorical, I look at what recurs—the desert and childhood, photography and music, violence on a personal and political scale—and there is an ongoing, loving nod to the artists who have shaped this poet's mind. I also sense that what drives his work is a desire to characterize the feeling of a time period, the later 20th century, with all its 'blindness/flying moth-crazy about the light.' I cannot turn away from these poems. This is a fascinating book"—Bob Hickok.