Battle Sleep

Poetry. BATTLE SLEEP by Shannon Tate Jonas is the winner of the 2014 Brick Road Poetry Book Award. In his stunning first collection BATTLE SLEEP, Shannon Jonas's poems casts such deep spells that their abiding voicings go under as well, as if poetry were also beneath the surfaces, an interior face of change. And the spells break, as they must, mid-lyric, again and again, for wounds, for losses and betrayals and exiles so willingly heard out that distance becomes a welcome medium. Frank Stanford summoned not from literary consensus but from a living consciousness. The dead and the alive, not drowning. And forgiveness as boundary crosser unto perpetuity. There is searing consolation here, the sort that returns trust to poetry. -William Olsen, author of AVENUE OF VANISHING