Jukebox takes place inside an Italian hazing ritual where senior male college students single out a freshman, lock him into a standing closet, and make him sing. In the chapbook, the narrator recounts his memories of being trapped inside the closet after his peers forget to let him back out.
As a bilingual poet, Harkins composed Jukebox first in Italian, then translated it herself into English. Like the name of the hazing ritual itself—fargli fare il jukebox (make him do the jukebox)—it exists as a poem between languages. Read more…
“Vivid, resonant, and cosmopolitan, the poems of The Paled Guest signal a remarkable debut. They capture how the outside feeds the inside, and how stories come to live within us, as they explore the multiplicity of experience and the proliferation of identity.”
—James Cihlar, author of The Shadowgraph
In The Paled Guest, Jessica Harkins gives painterly attention to moments and people lost. These poems move between the death of a brother, the estrangement of navigating foreign places, and a natural world which fails memory by being, constantly, made and unmade. These poems craft elegies as spaces for reclaiming presence—however brief, however painful—and for asking of their paled guests (earth, brother, body): how have we failed you? It is a generous and vital question and these poems resist everything, but the most startling and moving of answers. By crossing myth and wilderness, Oregon and Italy, The Paled Guest sweeps through time and space, bringing voice to the voiceless; bringing song to the silenced.
—Christopher Bolin, author of Ascension Theory
The lucky readers of The Paled Guest will find themselves in the hands of an author with a seductive depth and bursting intelligence. Jessica Harkins uses tree and earth, myth and memory to explore the complications, perplexities, pains and delights that the world brings. The result is a courageous and gorgeous study of what it means to be human.
—Betsy Johnson-Miller, author of Fierce This Falling
Jessica Harkins 