Description
Speech in an Age of Certainty
by J. Khan
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-521-5
2021
Khan is a prize-winning poet who has published activist works in the United States and internationally. Combining imagery and narrative technique, he takes the reader on compelling journeys into the times, locations and situations that underpin and drive much of the present demand for change.
His poems touch and connect many shores, from Black Lives Matter to hurricanes in Puerto Rico, from the Mayflower to Homan Square. From WW2 Japan to Standing Rock protests. He fiercely illustrates our past and ongoing battles against genocide, extractive energy, brutal policing, war-for-profit, and more in page turning, provocative lyric form.
Debbie Theiss (verified owner) –
J Khan’s book, Speech in an Age of Certainty is a deep and moving collection of storied injustices that are achingly affecting. The poems are intense yet intimate filled with stark details and unforgettable images of prejudices, inequalities, biases, and wrongs. You will find his poems accessible and will appreciate his emotional directness. I found the book compelling and highly recommend it.
Eric Ziegenhorn (verified owner) –
These poems kick ass. I devoured the whole book in one sitting. I’m now back on line buying copies for my kids and friends.
Denise LOW-WESO (verified owner) –
J.Khan’s new book is filled with intense, vivid language. Be ready for a high-speed chase as he critiques political injustices and assaults on the environment.
J. Khan –
An online interview by former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low regarding this book is posted at:
https://deniselow.blogspot.com/2021/08/denise-low-interviews-jemshed-khan.html
Please note I am the book author posting this comment and rating.
Meg Freer (verified owner) –
The author tackles contentious contemporary issues with skill in a lyrical but unflinching style that personifies and personalizes the marginalized people in his poems. A few brief interludes between more political poems reflect on environmental concerns, which of course are also political in their own way. A lot of thought and hard work went into this collection. Highly recommend.
Ronda Miller –
Speech in an Age of Certainty
Jemshed Khan’s book of poetry is a remarkable read. There are those people who are aware of social injustices, those who are blind to them, those who simply do not care, those who commit social injustices… and then there is Khan.
Khan bears witness personally, through observation, experiences and awareness, on a deeper, more cellular level.
Khan’s poems are necessary gut punches indicative of how inhumane humans the world over remain.
Khan’s poems are a brilliant and necessary reminder that there are those amongst us who care enough to give Voice to social injustice, not only to make us aware of them, but more importantly, to bring about change.
James Benger –
Speech in an Age of Certainty is one of the biggest, heaviest, most effortlessly nuanced books one is apt to read. That’s saying something for a chapbook that clocks in at just 35 pages. J. Khan makes not only every poem and page and stanza count, practically every syllable in this tiny tome of massive thought is honed with surgical precision for maximum impact, inviting, if not flat-out demanding multiple reads.
If Speech in an Age of Certainty has a singular goal, it is to give voice to and bring awareness of the oppressed, the misunderstood, the overlooked. J. Khan sings their songs in a way that is shocking, vibrant, sometimes brutal, and yet always beautifully lyrical.
Speech in an Age of Certainty is a book of resistance, a call to arms, a wakeup to those willing to listen, and ultimately a love letter to the often marginalized. J. Khan has created a small book of titanic truths that will permeate the reader long after it is closed.
-James Benger, author of From the Back
Maryfrances Wagner –
Speech in an Age of Certainty by Jemshed Khan
Humankind’s Inhumanity to Humans and Everything Else
If Cormac McCarthy had written poetry, his poems might resemble the content and messages of Jemshed Khan’s poems in Speech in an Age of Certainty.” Here is a world of injustice, cruelty, and evil spelled out in startling and real detail.
Khan’s opening poem, “The Suburban Stop” opens with a bang and sets the tone, mood, and content of what’s to come—a first-hand feel of oppressive fear and helplessness in a world where wrong rules. The poems that follow only escalate into what troubles America and the rest of the world: murder, crime, oppression, drugs, fracking, homelessness, guns, genital electrodes, prison, darkness.
Each of these poems nails the details so well that the reader will be pulled into the experience and stunned over and over as he piles up the sins of history. Whether it’s racism, prejudice at all levels, shootings, floods, buffalo extinction, the holocaust, or war, readers will hang on no matter how hard the truth is to face.
Every now and then there is a moment of justice like the racist and cruel Smith boys in “Maryville High School, 1973,” who ten years later are “doing life for murder one,” but more often the hardened can light a cigarette “before attaching genital electrodes” and root for the Cubs during acts of torture, or can shoot, hack, and stack skinned Buffalo carcasses for hides to sell. Since the landing of the Mayflower when pilgrims “by God [did] claim [the] land,” invaders have wrecked the people, the land, and the animals through cruelty and greed. Traces of what once was remain. Khan says, “Now bison bones still wash into angry creeks/with mastodon teeth, arrowheads, deer antlers./The Surly boneyard river reminds whose land this was.” Whether here in America or somewhere else voices are muted, Yemenites starve “while the Saudi’s build five new palaces on the Red Sea,” bombs fill the air but not for freedom like the rockets’ red glare, and “someone’s [always] listening at the door.”
Speech in an Age of Certainty is a powerful chapbook, one poem after another responding to the one before it, all focused on showing how widespread injustice can be. I’d recommend someone read the chapbook all in one sitting since the poems build on each other and give a vast picture of inhumanity. Khan has put together a book everyone should read and then read again.