In his stunning first collection Battle Sleep Shannon Jonas’s poems casts such deep spells that their abiding voicings go under as well, as if poetry were also beneath the surfaces, an interior face of change.  And the spells break, as they must, mid-lyric, again and again, for wounds, for losses and betrayals and exiles so willingly heard out that distance becomes a welcome medium.  Frank Stanford summoned not from literary consensus but from a living consciousness.  The dead and the alive, not drowning.  And forgiveness as boundary crosser unto perpetuity.  There is searing consolation here, the sort that returns trust to poetry.

—William Olsen, author of Avenue of Vanishing

For Shannon Tate Jonas sleep is the entrance for “No news from the stars,” which is good news.  Places abound—Michigan, Virginia, Carolina, Ohio, and elsewhere the landscape revealing itself as home to sounds that shape in the ear and become our own vernacular.  Here is clarity, richness, a spellbound solitude at once monastic and sensuous in the constant act of realization and discovery.  We journey with him toward a place we find for the first time.  A voice says: Take me with you.

 —Michael Heffernan, author of At the Bureau of Divine Music

Shannon Tate Jonas writes, “How do you make a song? / Arrange nine lit candles in the shape of a cross on the table / Cover the table with a white sheet / Growl into your hands / Write the words “profane” & “swan” on the mirror.”  Animated by a haunted phenomenology, these poems are hardscrabble koans, deft lyric implosions, minimal and aching delineations of the materiality and inescapability of memory.  Leaves appear in the shape of a hog.  The tilled field is a sparrow.  Darkness is essential.  Among the psychic impositions and possibilities created by his sharply rendered landscapes and domestic interiors, Jonas achieves on every page a desperate beauty that few contemporary American poets attempt.

—Tim Earley, author of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery