Chapbooks
Published in October 2024 by Finishing Line Press.
“‘[O]f what is our hour worthy?’ Paul Jaskunas asks in Mother Ship. One’s place in the passage of time—reckoned by both memory and forgetting—is the theme that knits together this marvelous collection. Jaskunas delicately probes the ways humans ravage the planet to create ‘the fractured melodies / of our slow catastrophe.’ Even in the face of catastrophe, though, the Mother Ship of Jaskunas’s title poem commands survivors: ‘Stay afloat.’ An especially haunting group of poems set in post-Soviet Eastern Europe—with its mushroom hunts, Lenin statues, and garrulous BMW dealers—explores what happens next. Paul Jaskunas asks the big questions with rare humility and genuine grace: Mother Ship is a collection to treasure.”
–Katherine E. Young, author of Woman Drinking Absinthe, Poet Laureate emerita, Arlington, Virginia
“With stunning imagery and patient, skillful syntax, these poems shimmer and brim with feeling. Here, we are intimate with mystery inside tea and clouds, in news of a death across the sea, in a bedroom slipper ‘walking the current with uneven steps’ down the Lethe river, in gathering chanterelles while learning Lithuanian words for ‘blueberry/ pine/ birch’.
I trust the intimate voice of these poems when it warns of our collective noise and ecological teetering as much as I do when the speaker leans towards a boozy giant stranger on a train, toasting to ‘euros, to dollars, to Mercedes Benz.’ This is a poet of imagination and deep compassion, conjuring a world where dreamlike imagery reveals truths underneath the oblivion of our days. Somehow, these poems meet the immensity of our moment on earth by making of our collective ecological disasters a myth of which we are the tragic center. As ‘We passersby/ yet smile and nod and shake/ hands with a feral future/ just now beginning to snarl.’ This is a book of poems I will hold close and return to again and again.”
–Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal
“In Mother Ship, Paul Jaskunas ferries back and forth across oceanic Lethes, singing of the warp of time, its disappointments and erasures. Pondering ‘the minor key of the age,’ he invites us to inhabit the lacunae between real and ideal, memory and forgetfulness, impermanence and endurance, always bringing to bear the poignant knowledge that all ‘wholes and halves / will vanish in the / indivisible sky.’”
–Malachi Black, author of Storm Toward Morning
Forthcoming this October from Spuyten Duyvil, with artwork by Warren Linn and an introduction by Marcus Civin, copies of Drawing Lessons can be pre-ordered here.
“Linn’s drawings are resplendent with fluid moments of pareidolia and perceptual switching. Faces form from bundles of shapes, interiors become exteriors, limbs and hands morph into less definable circumstances, all while the eye keeps guessing and dancing across each sketchbook page. Paired with Jaskunas’ engrossing poems, each drawing becomes even more mysterious, generating new possibilities for interpretation and raising questions about the relationships between figures, spaces, and narrative. A truly engaging experiment in word and image!”
--Deb Sokolow, artist and author of Environments for Controlling People: Best Practices
Selected Poems
“The Shells in Our House”, Spiritus, Fall 2024
“Pup in Stream”, THINK, Summer 2024
“Praying after the Night Train”, Presence, 2024.
“Bound to Happen”, Potomac Review, Spring 2024 issue.
“Criminals” and “Clouds Like Muscles” in The Pierian, Volume One, 2024.
“Mother Ship”, “The Wrong House”, and “Lenin Square” in The Vilnius Review. (These poems appear below the interview and prose excerpt.)
“Airspace in Wartime” in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place & Nature (Borders Issue).
“Chanterelles” in Hyacinth Review, June 2023.
“Our Questions” in Ekphrasis Magazine, Issue Four, 2023.
“To Be an Altar Boy” and “Missiles Over Indiana, 1983” in Hobart, April 2023.
“A Village No More” and “The Icon” in Panel (Budapest), Issue Ten, March 2023.
“Like a Thief in the Night” in Amethyst Review, February 2023.
“If/Then” in Five South, December 2022.
“Come to the Table” in Pensive, Issue Five, November 2022.
“Queequeg” in The Ekphrastic Review, October 2022.
“Vilnius to Warsaw, 2001” in Fare Forward, September 2022.
“Caught in the Lethe” in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Issue 10.5, September 2022.
“Moose” in The Comstock Review, Spring/Summer 2022.
“The Remnant” in The Windhover, Issue 26.1, May 2022.
“The Very Edge of All Things” in Atticus Review, June 2021