Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Roll Deep, and Leaving Saturn. He has edited Best American Poetry 2019 and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He is also the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s The Absurd Man (W. W. Norton & Company) subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism. He confronts his past, including his betrayals and his mistakes, and questions who he is as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a poet. The Absurd Man also faces outward, finding refuge in intellectual and sensuous passions. In Jackson’s view the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination. Poet and critic Sandra Simonds called it “Erudite…Moments of startling linguistic play interrupt Jackson’s elegant semiformal style… [The Absurd Man] bring[s] us back to an existential truth that only poetry’s fierce tenderness can offer.”