The first thing one notices when one reads a Jesse Nathan poem is: one’s body humming along to the music of his words.
How does such a thing work?
It’s the sound patterns—rhyme, inner rhyme, alliteration, assonance—yes, but it’s also how the poet uses the sound patterns on the line-by-line level, and as connective tissue between different poems, and finally, between different sections of the book. So the meaning lives in the music here, on both the micro and macro level, as the sound plays a live role in Nathan’s explorations of memory, his various investigations into ecology, into poetics of place, into history.
Which is to say, Eggtooth is not an ordinary debut but something quite different.
