This Is My Body

"Jonathan Fletcher's poems confront the reader with an almost unbearable directness. The mysteries they make are most often  paradoxically engendered by their clarity--reading a Fletcher poem, one feels one cannot possibly be reading such a direct, clear thing, and becomes disoriented by one's suspicion of one's comprehension, and a chasm opens between oneself and the poem. But the chasm is a gift--it is in the chasm that the poem echoes, and it is from the chasm that the poem haunts."
-Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
 
“‘Let’s alter the image,’ Jonathan Fletcher writes in a poetic self-portrait filled with longing and shame. ‘Or, better yet, let’s fracture it.’ His debut chapbook examines the fractures we see in ourselves and the fractures the world sees in us. Imaginative, deftly rendered, and defiant in the face of the pains and denials of masculinity, illness, and discrimination, the poems of This Is My Body are unapologetic expressions of self.”
-Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers
 
"In this brave suite of lyrico-narrative poems, Jonathan Fletcher offers his heart and his history “laid as bare to you / as a nude statue.” Chiseling away anything extraneous, Fletcher cuts through all the haze of life, distilling from disorderly experience a clearcut understanding of who he is and what path he took to get there. With their startling candor and exactitude of self-study, these poems remind me at times of the work of Frank Bidart, who might likewise say of the risen Christ: “I’ll believe it when I finger His wounds; / then I want Him to feel mine.” In This Is My Body, you will feel Fletcher’s wounds, but also his innocent wonder, seemingly inexhaustible hope, hard-won self-knowledge and -acceptance, and profound creative joy."
-Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation
 
"Jonathan Fletcher's poems draw us into the quiet, ordinary spaces--dens, bathtubs, bedrooms--to reveal the resonant and extraordinary transformations that take place within them. Here are poems of blood and dust and buckskin crafted with a tenderness and deep regard for the body's longings and losses. There is no wound or desire that Fletcher's poetry is afraid to touch. And in his exquisitely rendered moments of vulnerability we are awakened to the possibilities of erotic union and of spiritual deliverance."
-Deborah Paredez, author of Year of the Dog
 
"Jonathan Fletcher’s poems move with a supple feline silence within and around some of the most intimate and tender, and, also, some of the most terrible, of experiences. They are a triumph of  imaginative balance, clarity, and integrity in the face of all of reality’s powerful manifestations."
-Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 Sections