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Jake Syersak
he/his
poet, editor, educator, and translator
Jake Syersak is a poet, editor, educator, and translator currently living in Seattle, WA. He is the author of the poetry collections Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Books 2018) and Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow Press 2022), as well as several chapbooks.
He received a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Washington, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. His poetry and translations have appeared in such journals as Action, Asymptote, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Mississippi Review, Omniverse, and Volt, among others.
He is also the translator of four full-length books by Moroccan Francophone author Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. His first translation, Agadir (Diálogos Press 2020), was co-translated with Pierre Joris and longlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award. Several other books are forthcoming: Resurrection of Wild Flowers (Oomph! Press 2022); I, Caustic (Litmus Press 2022), which was the recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant; and Proximal Morocco— (Ugly Duckling Presse 2023).
About Their Work:
Jake's poems straddle the apocalyptic accuracy of the Anthropo-scenic present "world as it breaks" "jazz-like," until I is a fragile improvisation" and in between we begin to encounter what he calls "Shadowtime: A non-detachable parallel timescale that lurks alongside—haunts, perhaps—one’s day-to-day experience of regular time." In that space we feel through thorough, though not apart from "the waking wilderness of in-which a nervous system smartly tightens around", and "the brain, as well as the heart, goes potpourri" as we become aware of how we think things and they think us back, as we enter the abstract feeling “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world” while we wait like Jake, behind our mouths (agape), for the world too to make some sense of us.
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