Advance Praise
“There’s a new ‘sheriff on / Clue Street’ here to show us what’s ‘behind the luxury desks of Twit Street.’ Justin Jamail’s debut collection is dedicated to ‘my fathers,’ and you can sense the benign influence of such major New York School figures as Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi in Jamail’s exclamatory poems that celebrate motion and surprise, observe the ‘restless traffic,’ and pause for a negroni in Singapore before invoking the ‘god of business travel’ and planting ‘familiar beans in unfamiliar gardens.’ In one of the poems, Jamail likens himself to ‘an heir with live parents.’ This book is worthy of its legacy.” —David Lehman
“Earlier this century, a team of archaeologists from the University of Texas discovered the remains of a formerly unknown civilization on the site of an abandoned office park in the suburbs of Houston. Among the few artifacts present was a collection of fragments from what appears to be a much longer, more substantive text, a document characterized by one scholar as ‘part creation myth and part owner’s manual, part hymnal and part scratch-off lottery ticket.’ Is Justin Jamail familiar with this document? Is he privy to the complete version? Is he somehow responsible for its authorship? These are all questions Exchangeable Bonds asks but which Jamail, despite a series of emails and phones calls, refuses to answer.” —Carson Cistulli
Reviews &
Interviews
Best American Poetry Blog: New York School Diaspora by Angela Ball, July 2023
Justin Jamail ‘s poem, "Early April Subway," is a scintillant cocktail of utterance. Ashbery is in the mix, with his defamiliarizing of the quotidian; and French Surrealism, and maybe Latin American, and perhaps Martian, and perhaps other kinds, if they exist. The poem’s manic energy is O’Hara-like—an exuberance in which everything glimpsed or thought of seems a lucky find in need of sharing (“But I’m listening and I’m standing”). Throughout, we glimpse the famous, fabulous excitability of Kenneth Koch...
Best American Poetry Blog: Interview with Aspen Matis, September 2021
Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?
The reason great works become obscure is that there are too many great works to read conveniently and there is also (as Johnson noted) a social pressure that many seem to feel to keep up with whatever is current, so good things get neglected. I mean, I am 41 years old, have enjoyed English literature for decades, and am only now reading The Anatomy of Melancholy with attention. Yet there are serious people who consider it the most admirable work in the language!
Stride Magazine: "Poems I wish I'd written" by Martin Stannard, August 1, 2018
...[T]he poems here are linguistically and imaginatively exciting, and have a sense of life I can identify with. I’m taken to another place while being rooted firmly in this place, this world. I’ve read the poems twice, and I sense joy and melancholy, irony and resignation, humour and what the hell – poems and a poet you wouldn’t mind having a beer with...
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Justin Jamail, April 7, 2018
Justin Jamail is the author of the new poetry collection Exchangeable Bonds. He is the deputy general counsel of the Metropolitan Opera, and worked as a mergers and acquisitions attorney based in Tokyo. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Exchangeable Bonds
by Justin Jamail
Published by Hanging Loose Press
$18.00, 66 pages
ISBN 978-1-934909-51-5
soft cover
Available March 2018