Luther Jett
W. Luther Jett’s new poetry collection begins with the question, “Who made this house?”, reminding current residents “You did not get here on your own, / and when you sleep and dream, / you do not dream alone.” He closes observing, “There it lingers, unfinished – / the story we labored to sing,” but that’s as it should be for “we do not want this hymn to end. // Glory to the muck.” Throughout the poems in between, he sings his hymn, and prayer, to the muck and unfinished business that is America, the place and the dream, and to all who have had a hand in the making of it. And if those dreams often are foreboding (“Ground Zero”), that is an accurate mirror of the myth of America, and of our current fractured state. (He even accomplishes that rare feat, a truly original poem memorializing the victims of 9/11.) He imagines future archaeologists trying to recover our music, of libraries devoured by invading foxes and memories lost “until but a word remains — / then not even that, only the language of stones.” But he’s not ready to give up just yet (“Can U hear me / Ameri-ka in the rishrush / roar of the big trucks?”), and he offers this lesson from his own “Heritage” of ancestors “making war upon each other”: “At the last, / it’s neither the battle nor the war / but the peace which comes after \ that makes this world spin on and on.”
Praise for W. Luther Jett & Flying to America
Luther Jett’s book, Flying to America, is an invitation to exploration through visual, sensual, and often melancholy poems that immerse the reader equally in beauty and tragedy, offering an introspective immersion in empathy and love, and also conveying heartbreak and carnage through “Ground Zero,” and “Broken Code”, his gripping 9-11/war poems. Disillusionment rings strong in his poem, “American Dream”. Jett’s poems lay bare for reckoning the roughness and cruelty of humanity, yet defy the notion that we have no worth, that hope is in vain. In his “A Psalm for the Archaeologists,” Jett offers as much an admonition as a prayer that despite what our “dry bones” will one day say of us, “the carbon will not be deciphered” to adequately assess us. Luther Jett is masterful in his ability to entice with poems that are at once universal and personal. His imagery and list poems are intense and intimate, speaking of our humanness, if not at times our seeming inability to be humane. This collection is a must-read. It carries the reader swiftly yet calls us to re-read such elegance and beauty. Flying to America beckons us. The message is worthy of our embrace.
—J. Joy “Sistah Joy” Matthews Alford, Prince George’s County Poet Laureate Emerita (2018-2023)
In this meditative and powerful collection, Jett tells us, “you do not dream alone.” These poems get at the spiritual underbelly of life, the mysteries of existence, love, and loneliness, the “dream of yourself” we’re always struggling to remember. Jett writes evocative poems that recall “the nameless ache” we all carry through our day-to-day tasks. He’s carrying it right there with us, guiding us through while we tremble at the beauty of life.
— CL Bledsoe, author of Having a Baby to Save a Marriage & The Bottle Episode
Luther Jett’s poems diagram “the fulcrum of our age” scattered across little towns with their “slow progress of lamps”, which are but a sacrament for the “highway[s] of crows” to “a dusky smear of molecules spreading in the autumn wind”. The mementos of Flying to America are suburban dreams turned nightmares, generational conflicts and conquerings that have imprinted a nation of people, “their blood, once opposed, mingles in me”. Jett asks a country drowning in her own egoism to “[t]ear up those papers, your bills of passage, your manifests, destinies, and all that come after” and to suppose instead, “an angel passed among these narrow streets at midnight”. There is a deeply rooted logicism in Jett’s writing, one that lays bare the brutalism of historic moments against oozing taboo fantasy, the perfect foil for shocking political theater: “Let’s play pretend. You be the daddy.” Tragic histories in Flying to America are “an animal which was never given a name, cries in the night”. Jett masterfully anchors the vastness of the American ideal in realism seen through “eyes sealed with copper, our hands eroding to bone, to radium”. This is not magical realism, the “windsea washing away the little shells on which we have scratched our names / the only mark remaining”, but American realism.
— Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes, publisher at Beltway Editions
About the Author
W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, including The GW Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Bourgeon (now The Mid-Atlantic Review), New Verse News, Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, Rockhurst Review, District Lit, Footnote, Third Wednesday, Live Encounters, Tuck Magazine, Algebra of Owls, Lines & Stars, and Main Street Rag. His poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Proud to Be (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2013), My Cruel Invention (Meerkat Press, 2015), Element(ary)My Dear and Secrets and Dreams (both from Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2015 & 2016), Written in Arlington (Paycock Press, 2020), The Great World of Days (Day Eight, 2021), and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). Luther’s poem “Zeta” was named a co-winner in the 2022 American Writers Review competition, sponsored by San Fedele Press. Most recently, “How Many Fingers”, published in Bourgeon, was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize.
He is the author of five poetry chapbooks: Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Our Situation (Prolific Press, 2018), Everyone Disappears (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Little Wars (Kelsay Books, 2021), and Watchman, What of the Night? (CW Books, 2022).
Portions of this book were performed as a spoken word piece during the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival in Washington D.C.
