Jason Schneiderman – författare

In five poetic sequences, Jason Schneiderman’s Hold Me Tight considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner. Starting with a long poem about his own struggle to find peace, the collection is searingly grounded in the personal, anchored to Schneiderman’s own life. The collection moves to a sequence of parables about wolves, which obliquely consider intractable political conflicts and the emotional fallout of relationships that are structured around predators and prey. The next sequences focus on technology and art, looking at how technologies extend the possibilities of the human body, which alters what it means to be human. A long set of poems about Chris Burden explore the artist’s movement from the personal, self-inflicted violence of his early work to the larger questions of political violence that inform his later work. In the final sequence, Schneiderman imagines a series of “last things”—in which finality gives meaning to the people and things in question. In the end, Schneiderman’s project invokes a kind of old fashioned humanism, embracing the ruptures in our contemporary ways of living and thinking.

In Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire, Jason Schneiderman confronts the rise of extremism and antisemitism in the United States while grappling with the end of his marriage and finding his feet as a newly single gay man.

Following up on his landmark collection Hold Me Tight, Jason Schneiderman extends his personal and historical explorations in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Schneiderman’s signature sense of humor works as a connective tissue across the book, even as the juxtapositions become more unlikely (Kafka and Hillary Clinton?), the historical scope becomes wider, and the personal revelations cut deeper than ever before. These poems represent Schneiderman’s most direct and explicit exploration of Jewish heritage and history, bringing to the surface a theme that has often been missed in his work. The strength of these poems is in their power to trace the wound as a form of healing, to confront the agonizing in order to make way for joy and, yes, love.