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“Nicorvo’s wry and seriocomic debut presents scenes, symbols, and durable remarks from the life of his titular alter ego, a figure (like Berryman’s Henry or Mary Jo Bang’s Louise) who both is and is not the author, whose searing and ridiculous misadventures make him sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than life, anyone or everyone, with modern bourgeois problems, unspooling obligations, and a washed-out interior life...Nicorvo, who lives in Michigan, delivers these scenes in free verse with a confident cadence, never prosy but never too far from prose sense. Coherent and memorable in its dry sadness, this sequence may...also grow stranger upon rereading, its meditations on fatherhood, descent, masculinity, and responsibility giving it something that most of those models lack.”—Publishers Weekly
Poems that offer a compassionate yet relentless portrait of Deadbeat—an absent father and husband—and the family that goes on without him
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s debut collection revolves around a central character, called Deadbeat—a descendant of John Berryman’s Mr. Bones, Marvin Bell’s Dead Man and Ted Hughes’s Crow, to name an irrepressible few. The poems weave together a domestic narrative as Deadbeat himself muddles through courtship, marriage, divorce, estrangement and, of course, fatherhood. An effigy for America and our culture of recession, Deadbeat is brought to life with honesty, sympathy and love in all of its complications.
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Endorsements:
"These poems explore what it is to be loving and loveless and ultimately give us an irreducible view of our humanity. Deadbeat is a book of joy, melancholy and abiding tenderness.”—Terrance Hayes
“…these poems provide a literary feast with intelligence and panache to spare.”—Campbell McGrath
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JAY BARON NICORVO lives on an old farm in Michigan with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their rambunctious son, and a dozen vulnerable chickens.
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