Songs for the Long Night embraces the lyrical history of poetry while exploring contemporary queer culture through the eyes of a man struggling to navigate his first same sex relationship, a relationship separated by thousands of miles and mere inches simultaneously. Through sex, rejection, magic, and rivers, Jones’s debut collection tries to understand what it means to be a queer man in rural America traveling across time and place.
Author Bio
Korbin Jones graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with degrees in Creative Writing & Publishing and in Spanish, and is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at the University of Kansas. He has had poems, short stories, and lyric essays appear in various literary magazines across the nation, including Levee Magazine, The Oakland Review, Ellipsis Literature & Art Journal, among others. His translation of Pablo Luque Pinilla’s poetry collection SFO: Pictures and Poetry about San Francisco was published by Tolsun Books in April 2019. He works as editor-in-chief and head designer for Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal, which he founded in 2018.
Praise
“These songs for the long night wrap the reader in layers of shadow. Korbin Jones, through provocative and often disturbing images, invites us into a world where separation from the dark beloved becomes a vehicle for self-revelation. From the violence of first sex ‘never before / had I felt like a serpent / mouth unhinged, welcoming.’ through first heartbreak “this is not / the death of love, but rather / its transformation,” Jones urges us to break and reset the bones of our own desire. This book will tap into your youth – and leave you wiser.” — Robert Carr, The Unbuttoned Eye
“Like the queer icon Saint Sebastian, these poems are filled with the body’s injuries and yearnings, through both arrow and Eros. Reconciling a torrid past with an uneasy present, they construct a church, but it is a cathedral built from ‘the red-breath rooms of men’ to embrace desire, to reclaim sex as communion. ‘Erotic as dragonflies clutched in flight,’ Jones’s Plathian poems are an exorcism of past lovers and a strained history of fathers and sons. And once exorcised, they seek a new religiosity to ‘swallow up / what’s foreign.’” — Jacques J. Rancourt, In the Time is PrEP
