The World Will Deny It For You
Ahsahta Press, 2012
““A tightly wound collection of poems that use minimalistic style to create wide-open moments of great weight.””
Winner of the inaugural Ahsahta Press Chapbook Award, selected by Catherine Wagner
The World Will Deny It For You is a compact sequence of poems about learning to love beneath the certainty of loss. Written during a period of emergence from the darker terrain of my first chapbook, Your Name Is the Only Freedom, it does not imagine recovery as the defeat of darkness. Instead, the poems search for a light that can be created within darkness, allowing the two to remain present together.
Most of the poems address an unnamed “you”: the beloved, the absent other, the unknowable presence toward which the speaker continues to move. The collection follows that pursuit through desire, dispossession, surrender, and the gradual recognition that everyone we love will be lost. Rather than treating that knowledge as cause for despair, the poems move toward the difficult freedom that may become possible when impermanence is fully admitted.
The book also records an early stage of the ritual writing practice that would shape my later work. I wrote at night, with the house dark except for two votive candles, using a somatic process to enter the trance state from which the poems emerged. Their minimal forms hold sharp contrasts—light and darkness, presence and absence, annihilation and renewal—without forcing those oppositions into resolution.
Selected Press
Monkeybicycle
Interview: “Janaka Stucky, Author of The World Will Deny It For You”
Horse Less Press
“Jeff Alessandrelli to Janaka Stucky”