In J.R. Solonche’s short collection of poems centered around his experience of a heart-attack and subsequent recovery, we find a turning inward to the experience of consciousness as its existence is threatened by the failures of the body. He broaches dying with a matter-of-factness, as one of many wounds to his sense of self. The poems in Heart’s Content are meditations on perspective as mediated by the body’s senses. They confront, in sometimes playful style, the mind-body split that undergirds Western culture from at least the time of Descartes’s slogan “I think therefore I am.”Through a radically fresh understanding of his own mortality, Solonche radiates hope in equal parts with regret. He does not go gently into an old age of austerity and physical deprivation brought on by doctor’s counsel about how to live in the wake of a heart-attack. The loneliness and solitude of cold, white hospital spaces is tempered with hopeful images of the afterlife as “a long nap out of doors / some afternoon at the very end of summer, / the first Sunday of September say, perhaps / in the outsized hammock slung between/ the two black birch trees out back.” Heart’s Content is a memento mori grounded in the arteries and organs, the movement of the body’s blood. It is the reflective voice of the poet as he makes ready for the grave. But not yet. Above all, in Heart’s Content J.R. Solonche reminds us to live.

Heart's Content

Literature & Fiction

Solonche, J.R.

Poetry

Five Oaks Press

In Coming To, brevity is the soul of J.R. Solonche's wit.

Coming To

David Robert Books

According to Lord Polonius in Hamlet, brevity is the soul of wit. In the poetry of J. R. Solonche, brevity, soul and wit co-exist superbly. Start with any of his poems. You'll find, unlike much of what is written these days, the wit is never far from the surface. As for the brevity, imagine an appetizer that's as filling as a main course. And, after the meal, after the laughter, the soul will be what lingers. John Grey, author of What Else Is There, Main Street Rag's Editor's Poetry Series Solonche is productive and prolific, but that doesn't water down his poetry... He can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines... His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems. Solonche sees humor and encapsulates it; he frames a thought in perfect verse... He's playful and profound - the more he writes, the more he seems to know. Beneath the Solonche simplicity are significant social comments, and his goodwill reinforces the best in us. Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books Solonche, an accomplished poet, employs various forms in this compilation, including haiku, prose poem, and free verse. The poems often imaginatively enter into the natural or material world via anthropomorphic similes... Many works have an aphoristic quality that recall Zen koans, and they can be playfully amusing or even silly... A strong set of sympathetic but never sentimental observations. Kirkus Reviews In a style that favors brevity and pith, J.R. Solonche brings a richness of experience, observation, and wit into his poems. Here is the world! they exclaim. And here, and here, and here! Watched over by ancient lyric gods - Time, Death, and Desire - we find the quotidian here transformed. Christopher Nelson, editor of Green Linden Press The best feature of Solonche's poetry is its diversity. Everyone who encounters this volume (including the postman who delivers it to you) will find something in it to understand and remember -- and a great deal to enjoy. Tony Beyer, author of Anchor Stone, finalist for the New Zealand Book Award

Life-Size

Kelsay Books

Reading Takuboku Ishikawa

This book of poems purposefully presents writing in which the poet himself is absent. Instead of writing about his life or experiences, Solonche focuses on the work of other poets, rewriting famous verse in the style of others and showcasing his vast knowledge of the poetry of the last two centuries.

Invisible

Piano Music, the new poetry collection from JR Solonche, presents him at his best. The wit, the insights, the playfulness, the craft, the profundity, and yes, at times the silliness, are all here on full display to the delight of the reader, whether that reader be new to the Solonche universe or one returning for more.

Piano Music

Serving House Books

Although J.R. Solonche started placing poems in magazine, journals, and anthologies in the early 70s, his first book of poetry, Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter, co-written with his wife, did not appear until 2002 and his own first collection, Beautiful Day, not until 2015. Just this March, Years Later, his twenty-second book, was published. That's a lot of books, too many for most readers to buy. But they don't have to. They can buy just one. It's his twenty-third. Selected Poems: 2002 - 2021 is a generous offering of his favorite poems from most of those books, including the two nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Invisible (2017) and Piano Music (2020) and the 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book, The Porch Poems. In her introduction to Selected Poems: 2002-2021, Grace Cavalieri says, "The absolute best remark I can make about this book is that I would give it to non-readers of poems as a conversion to poetry, for its language is as available as rain; hopeful as sunshine; and fresh as the wind. It's a perfect book to let the reading public know that this is America's poetry. This is a serious book disguised as playfulness, and we are its lucky recipients." J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 400 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s.

J.R. Solonche Selected Poems 2002-2021

These very short poems are an extraordinary amalgam of wit, close observation, humor, and clear-seeing. Each one singles out and illuminates an ordinary moment—ordinary, that is, until the poet explodes it into a miniature epiphany. Easy of access and frequently profound, J.R. Solonche’s poems induce in me a state of delighted surprise. 
 Chase Twichell 
 In In Short Order, J.R. Solonche can pack so much humor and linguistic playfulness into such tight bundles, it feels like 1,000 clowns issuing from a V.W. Bug. He can also fit a lot of darkness and mortality into them, which feels more like 1,000 clowns dressed like Marilyn Manson issuing from a V.W. Bug. Solonche can be crass the way only the truthful can be, mischievous as a child with his hands in the honey jar, or even aphoristic and proverbial like a modern day Martial. Though you never know which Solonche you’re going to encounter on the next page, he’s a great bunch of guys to get to know. 
 Stephen Cramer, winner of the National Poetry Series and the Louise Bogan Award 
 Sample one by one these epigrammatic, epiphenomenal, Epicurean episodes as if they were puffs from a tower of pastry. Savor the zest of lemon, the pinch of sea salt, the dollop of crème fraîche, and the absence of any more sugar than necessary to ease the ingestion of truth. A feast for fanatics of language and lovers of pith. I’m not sure what pith is, but I know it when I see it. 
 Sarah White, author of Alice Ages and Ages, Wars Don’t Happen Anymore, and to one who bends my time

In Short Order

Poetry. "These short poems are an extraordinary amalgam of wit, close observation, humor and clear-seeing. Each one singles out and illuminates an ordinary moment&#65533;ordinary, that is, until the poet explodes into a miniature epiphany. Easy of access and frequently profound, J.R. Solonche's poems induce in me a state of delighted surprise."&#65533;Chase Twichell

In a Public Place

DOS Madres Pr

In If You Should See Me Walking on the Road, J.R. Solonche’s poems have the grace of Dickinson, the exuberance of Neruda, and the wintry darkness of Frost. In riddles, haikus, aphorisms, odes, and prose poems, Solonche praises the objects and beings of this world – a desk, a sunflower, a wastepaper basket, a hawk dismembering its prey on his lawn, a dog in a car with Alaska plates. He feels joy while pretending to be a tree for his daughter’s game of tag, but cannot find solace in easy spirituality. When told by a stranger in “Blackbird” that the bird follows him because he has “a great soul,” the poet balks: “The day I believe that is the day/I commit suicide without leaving a note.” In his prose poem, “On Being Asked by a Child to Teach Her How to Tell Time,” the poet takes a Borgesian, paradoxical pleasure in explaining how to read a calendar: “You make up the story as you turn the pages. The problem is the faster you turn them, the shorter the story becomes.” The expansive voice then snaps back into the near-silence of a frozen lake under layers of snow and ice. Don’t be fooled by the puns -- these poems are never light. If we should see Solonche walking on the road…/(his) hair matted, the rain running like long/slender plaits of silver hair down (his) neck,/and he’s smiling, we should worry. We’re next. 
 Hilary Sideris

If You Should See Me Walking on the Road

Literary

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