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Praise for “The New Clean” by Jon Sands:
“With the groundbreaking and deftly crafted “The New Clean,” Jon Sands has brashly shifted the landscape, changing what we know about the limits of stanzas that spill so helplessly from the self. These are poems of a city’s insistent romances and our determination to root ourselves in its clutch, a clutch that nurtures us while taking our breath away. These are poems of backslap and revelation. No one but Jon could have done this.”
– Patricia Smith, National Book Award Finalist, author of “Blood Dazzler”
“These are high-stakes, honest poems, & Jon Sands is a high-stakes, honest poet of wild range. Sands possesses the remarkable ability to celebrate just as deeply as he mourns. & whichever city he moves through in his poems–New York, Cincinnati, the city of the heart, grief, or the afterlife–one can be certain that there will be some singing. That’s just what these poems do. They beg you to give them your voice. They jangle time & lunge at silence, making readers survive the difficult world all for the possibility of the poems’ revelations, songs, & the importance of their reckonings.”
– Aracelis Girmay, author of “Teeth” & “Changing, Changing”
“Jon Sands’ poems are full of zip and quirk. They dart energetically toward memory—and away from it, too. They remind us—through elegy, love poem, ghazal, one-liner, list and ode—what coercive forces alienation and forgetting can be in our daily lives. The poems are filled with restlessness, the whitewater current from which the book takes its hard mouthfuls (So when a moment of calm does arrive, you sense Sands has tasted from some deep aquifer). This is poetry that renders a struggle between anonymity and intimacy, fast-talk and reflection. Seems to me, in The New Clean, you will encounter a speaker who is searching for a place to laugh, a language to weep in, and an exile to love.”
– Patrick Rosal, Author of “Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive” & “My American Kundiman”
“From Koch to Holman, the Cincinnati/NY pipeline lands downtown (once again) for the neo-New York School set in Jon Sands’ debut stunner, The New Clean. Sands scours buses in Queens, faceless bullets, and a city full of “back talk” to find a place where we all can “fall madly in Jon,” and we do. Always fresh, The New Clean is a poetics of triumph, of Whitmanian interstellar interconnection. Sands’ nice guy stanzas make these moments not only profound, but also very human.”
– Michael Cirelli, author of “Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard” & “Vacations on the Black Star Line”