Find Me When You're Ready

“In Perry Janes we have a powerful new voice in poetry. Now LA based, but coming out of metropolitan Detroit’s eclectic body of poets, Janes writes in all genres, but at long-last comes Find Me When You’re Ready, a stirring debut poetry collection divided into five acts. Janes displays, beneath the skill acquired over years of ‘doing the work,’ an unabashed earnestness that suggests an authentic need to say what cannot be easily told. As he notes, there are ‘so many / routes to the heart’s city.’ Janes writes as if through a prism—from several vantages. He compellingly repeats, insists, retracts, and iterates details of stories in an attempt not to get to the ‘what’ of an event, but the ‘who.’ To whom has this happened and who has this storyteller become? Janes is at the core a storyteller, and as any good storyteller knows, memory has its demands—Janes is determined to meet them. Read this bildungsroman and you will be inspired by Janes’s unsparing commitment to self-reclamation and hard-won joy.” —Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World

“If a book could be your best friend, could be the dreamt of gentle avenger who gets you through the hardest nights of childhood. If a book could let you know life is so hard, but just wait, and you will find a world where even the pain you endured will find a way to blossom into deep health, into the deeply generative erotic. If a book could say: yes, the city is burning, the world is burning, some wounds never heal: but look at all your beloveds assembling. If a book could go back in time and teach me how to become an adult and carry my losses and make a world of extraordinary beauty that never says those losses didn’t happen? God, that book would be this book. Find Me When You’re Ready. I have been waiting my whole life.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

"Find Me When You’re Ready, in its imaginative daring and unabashed boldness, is both a testimony to the inescapable hold of memory and place as well as an interrogation about selfhood. Janes’s writing is filled with lyrical splendor, reflection, and attention to detail; this was a joy to read.” —Airea D. Matthews, author of Bread and Circus

"Oh boy. This book. Perry Janes. Goddamnit. Thank you. Find Me When You’re Ready is a lyric confrontation with the kind of boyhood meant to keep you quiet. My Midwestern heart. My survivor-seen heart. Our hearts that are still, despite it all, our hearts. This book. This intimate debut collection has poems that sear and devastate, but also poems that play and beckon tenderness. Yes, somehow, tenderness. Here it comes! Get ready!" —Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of Not Here: Poems