Waiting for a Spaceship

Author: J. Otis Powell

Publisher: Spout Press (2017)

In Waiting For A Spaceship, J. Otis Powell pens a deep acknowledgement to both the pain of language and its potential for liberation. In these elegant and absorbing poems, Powell plays soloist to a backdrop of jazz rhythm, capable of moving from the elegiac to the celebratory in one shift of tone, expressing the haunted nature of American life: “Ghosts hitch rides on bodies/move inside souls.” The lyrical improvisation of his lines moves us simultaneously closer to moments of insight, haunting, and deliverance. “Ivory bones at the bottom of the Atlantic / Ghosts dance to water music nobody composed.” To read Waiting For A Spaceship is to find deep recognition with openness and ferocity. His poems describe how the moment of poetic expression arrives in daily life at soul level. This is a poetry of necessity.