A debut poetry collection is exciting because you don’t know what to expect. It’s possible you’ve encountered the poet’s voice in journals, but to immerse yourself in a recently-published first collection is to spend time getting to know a fresh, new poetic voice. It may turn out to become a favorite. It is in this spirit that I approached Rogue Astronaut, the debut poetry collection by Mitchell Jacobs, out now from The University of Arkansas Press. A finalist for the prestigious Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, Rogue Astronaut is a book I will surely go back to again and again. The themes move around, from his father’s alien abduction as a teenager, to his brother’s mental illness, from his young life in Minnesota to his current life in California. Here’s the poem that opens the book:
Abduction
It hovered. In slow wind.
While he stood. Still as slate.
Clenching his bicycle’s handlebars.
Its billowing feathers.
Were planes of its flesh. Encroaching.
Briefly from a different. Manner of space.
It could. See. Belief invading him.
Saw his organs laid open. Like an atlas.
Surging tributaries of adrenaline.
His heart. That citadel of sensitivity. Quickening.
Billions of neurons unskeined.
Into a single. Silver filament. Taut.
It kept. Unfurling into entireties of itself.
To teach him. With its body. True. Sight.
To pry the latent sense. Up. From his cells.
Then its convolutions swerved.
Into a sphere. Of many roundnesses.
He felt. The same shape roll. Along his interior.
Knee scrotum clavicle cheek. Like wet fire.
He spasmed. Groaned. Saw now. It had no. Size.
But was. On another scale. Vast.
Looming like its own sky. Beyond some boundary.
Holiness was simply. This hugeness. Which arrives.
As a wind from elsewhere.
To behold. To be.
Held in the. Sinews of its knowing.
It cradled. The lack of holiness in him.
Like a topaz. That it took. As he lurched.Into the viscous light.
Reading his debut collection, I understand that Jacobs writes poetry in gasps and moments. In “The Ultramundane” he writes: “Home’s all bleed and sugar.” The poem “Unicorn Contortionist” begins, “Here’s the moral: the unicorn was not enough.” In “Mustache”, a poem that looks at Groucho Marx through the eyes of a woman who is besotted with him: “Three times she’s watched him cavort amid the plywood tropics,/ throwing himself about with nimble buffoonery, zesting the air/ with puns.” And don’t miss the poem titled, “My Own Private New Hampshire."
Rogue Astronaut is such a brilliant debut, I’m already longing for the next collection from Mitchell Jacobs.
Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Disaster Tourism (BOA Editions, 2025), Experiment 116 (Counterpath Press, 2021), and half-fabulous whales (Little Dipper, 2019). Her novella Nick Trail’s Thumb won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Mosteirin is co-author, with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) and Perceptron (punctum books, 2025). Mosteirin teaches at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.
