New Releases by Jacob Scheier

A challenging exploration of mental illness and disability from Governor General’s Award winner Jacob Scheier. Is This Scary? digs deep into internal landscapes of suffering, including depression and anxiety, chronic physical ailment, and rare neurological malady. With its many eccentric songs and odes to medications and medical procedures, this book is full of both levity and unapologetic lament. Pushing back against societal stigma, Is This Scary? unflinchingly addresses experiences of psychiatric institutionalization and suicidality, without either romanticizing or pathologizing them. Scheier rejects much of the mainstream cultural views of mental illness, subverting the biochemical model by emphasizing the radical subjectivity of mental suffering. While the poems render the difficulty of communicating pain to others, they defiantly celebrate its expression and evocation through visceral lyricism. Scheier also challenges our culture’s desire to be inspired by stories of “triumphing” over illness and disability. Nothing is overcome here, the journey from illness to wellness is one of narrative and aesthetic disruption. The perpetually incomplete search for self and home is ultimately at the heart of this book: along with being a person with disabilities, the poet-speaker identifies as a Diaspora-Jew, engaging exile as a chronic state of being that isn’t intended to be resolved, but rather explored, expressed, and honored.

In Letter from Brooklyn, Jacob Scheier examines love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of his new poems is the notion that we understand who we are by where we have been. Here, a confessional voice digs deep into a radical Jewish heritage rooted in New York City. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical. Whether eating in a knish restaurant on the Lower East Side or falling in and then out of love with the Brooklyn Bridge, being startled while biking down a prairie road or searching for a European village wiped clear off the map, with depth and originality Scheier confronts the question of where home is and what it means amid private and public loss.

The death of a young man’s mother instigates this collection of remarkable poems that seeks to map the limitations and breaking points of the human heart. The question of how and why humans fall in and out of love becomes a haunting refrain as the intricacies of relationships are probed. As his inherited belief systems continue to fail, the narrator also attempts to formulate a new, complex sense of self. Full of humor, sardonic wit, and conversational charm, this collection enchants as it strives to find the ultimate answers to love and life.