DB Jonas is the author of two poetry collections: Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023) and Flight Risk (2025). His third collection, In Dubious Terrain, is forthcoming. Known for his evocative and thought-provoking verse, Jonas explores themes ranging from personal displacement to the intricacies of the natural world. His work reflects a deep engagement with language and form, often blending the lyrical with the introspective. In addition to his published collections, more of his poetry can be found online at jonaspoetry.com.
She Who Speaks: A Foreword
Found among the Walmart Bargain Books
I am not the author of this book. Someone else must write it. Someday, perhaps. Or just as likely never. Perhaps it has almost been written. Maybe you, its reader, must complete it. Maybe, not being its author, I have no right to speak, no status here. Perhaps I’m not the authoritative voice, even in my denial, that you’d expect to be speaking from these pages, not even a character in this story. And yet here you are, face-to-face with what it is. Or will be. Undeniably. And there it lies, I imagine, quizzically, defiantly, perhaps a little uncomfortably, in your hands.
It has a kind of reality, a certain heft, a density of sorts, an odor of pulp and mystery. The edge of a page, of that dust jacket, handled wrong, can slice a finger…..But don’t be misled by the bulk you’re holding. That’s just the measure of its peculiar insubstantiality: the ink, the rustling pages, the thoughts, all the words it uses, their curious densities…. There’s a winning innocence about you, I’m supposing, the way you fearlessly crack it open to a random page, let your eye drift down to a random spot, read a sentence or two, flip to another spot, forward to the Contents or the opening sentences, slap it shut, appreciate the cunning detail of its cover design at arm’s length. You are fearless, that much is clear. Me, not so much. I’ve lived with it too long, perhaps, lived in it, beside it, beneath it…..
The book is something like the sky, in my view. Or a thing like a sky. Like the blue monotony overhead, or like a lid, something fallen, something pressing. Its weight can isolate, release, repress. Depends on you, I suppose. Like some varieties of sky, it offers up its transitory sceneries. Its subject matter, its contents, appear like cloud, shape-shift, drift over the horizon, fade into indistinctness. Its impersonality, its staggering indifference, is infinitely suggestive, endlessly referential. The scenes it presents to your imagination, like cloud, may suggest to you things familiar: a horse, a nose, a tree.
But, like cloud, the recognizable images fade, dissolve, and reestablish, before you know it, their aura of stark impossibility, of remoteness and evasiveness, their annoying fragmentarity and bothersome urgency…..What is it about, this book? you probably wonder. Ahh. I was afraid you’d ask that. And I’m a little afraid to be obliged to answer. Because you may think I’m being insincere, abstruse, toying with you, or trying to be provocative. Let’s see. To be about something is to not be the thing it is about, I guess, to stand apart from it. Here, I’d say, you have in hand a hopeless, paltry thing, something incapable of standing at a distance from the things in it, from the world outside it, even from you perhaps, or from itself. I maintain it’s something that isn’t really there, that only just approaches, comes near, from outside the realm of capability, detachment, effectiveness.
Perhaps it’s nothing but the substance of this volatility it seems to describe, present, evoke. Not something that follows an occurrence, as a philosopher has said, but that’s itself an occurrence, the harbinger of its own irreducible futurity, always the voice of something somewhere up ahead, forever inactual…..And what’s it for, then? you may reasonably ask, since you seem to be a reasonable person, what’s it good for? I’m tempted to say “for nothing,” to say it’s good for nothing at all. But this would sound far too arrogant, avant-garde, insouciant, off-putting to the potential paying customer. Yet I’m obliged to admit that any value you might assign to it must belong to another dimension than the useful, to another system, another economy.
It cannot help you fix a drain or illuminate the career of Metternich or be a calmer, kinder person. It’s you who must decide, I’m afraid, just what it might be good for. It’s just one of those things, like many others perhaps, a canvas of Pollockor Bacon, a sculpture of Caro or Smith, the creak of floorboards in the night: something that leaves you to your own devices, absolutely alone, no help in sight. The only hope it offers you, I guess, perhaps your only real option, is that you regard it as a kind of door and not a space. A passage, not a place. Perhaps an exit from the commonplace, a passage outward from the useful, the edifying, the familiar.
But to where? And here it’s really up to you again, I reckon, to the slim possibility that you will hear, somewhere in the curious noise it makes, in this strange assemblage of the words, the rustling noise that dwells already in your ear, the sound that living makes and, isolated as we creatures are, exotic as the common air, the distant rumor of this life we all must lead. What reality it has, you could say, is something metamorphic, transformative, a curious instance of the vague recurrences that return you somehow changed to exactly where you live.
The story here, dear reader, if story this be, is not mine in any personal sense, but your own. I, you must remember, don’t quite exist. “You be the judge,” as it says in Proust, “Did we get it right?” It’s a tall order, I realize. And if you can spare that $5.99, it’s really up to you. You are always free to set it back down on this stack, or anywhere at all on this crowded table. No questions asked.
You, flesh and blood of all these words, citizen of the land of unfettered possibility, must decide.
The Galway Review 