bastard bee by Jawn Van Jacobs

bastard bee is better read barefoot with a beer…better yet…Jim Beam in hand (splashed over some rocks). It exudes the stickiness of spring or as Jawn Van Jacobs puts it: the perfume of me precipitates. Jacobs’ knows that spring only comes after a fistfight with winter. He illuminates the risks of (in all our fragile-masculine-glory) staying out in the cold: for i’ve seen too many men / attempt to crush out iridescence – / then recede & go ashen/ for all the light they knocked out. The poems show us we have a choice and assure us: the stained glass wings /of dragonflies cannot /be shattered by boys skipping rocks/ on the riverside. This debut chapbook floats like a genuine butterfly and stings like a bastard bee. It has the heart of a robin’s cheerily-cheer up-cheer up-cheerily-cheer up-song. When this poet imparts & no wizard is ever shy, he is the wizard and each page buzzes with his bold magic.

–John Wojtowicz, author of Roadside Attractions: a Poetic Guide to American Oddities

Don’t be fooled by the honey-sweet pastoral scenes in Jawn Van Jacobs’ debut collection. As the title suggests, bastard bee provides a most unexpected clash: on one hand, the natural world alight with flora and fauna–a bee’s delight–and on the other, vices of the industrialized world–bourbon and bullets, the “illegitimate strain of nectar.” The tone remains light in rhythm, with the occasional rhyme and even exclamations! Yet beneath the surface, Jacobs crafts tension through lines packed with juxtapositional language. At one point, he asks of the spring robin, “why can’t more men / be just as kind as you?” And through Jacobs’ poems we see a subtle critique of men bred by society, and a longing for connection that is pure and “rooted in the ground.”

–Katie Budris, author of Mid-Bloom and Prague in Synthetics

If you look inside Jawn Van Jacobs poem, you might find a bee drunk on the oils of a rose. You will experience the dueling seasons, and out of the stillness of winter, when spring returns, you will, no doubt, take delight in the many pollinators, the bees and dragonflies and the other creatures. With an impassioned sense of detail—with perhaps a slight lyric echo of Emily Dickinson—these are nature poems, pastoral poems, written for a new age, briefly and intensely rendered. And like medieval exempla, they offer examples of how Nature warns us and advises us. But these are playful poems, too. In Jawn Van Jacobs poem you might address a robin directly, praising it for its steadfastness. Likewise the praying mantis may be a “headhuntress,” but her commitment is preferable to half heartedness of men. These poems also surprise us. When you listen to the sound of a Jawn Van Jacobs poem, you will hear the voice of a poet slightly drunk on language, savoring the sounds of words like bergamot and echinacea. But I was perhaps most surprised to discover that there is a kind of protective spell in these poems.  In a Jawn Van Jacobs poem, the “wings/ of dragonflies” are like stained glass windows that “can not / be shattered by boys / skipping rocks on the riverside.”

–Ron Block, author of The Dirty Shame Hotel: And Other Stories