Mine Eclogue

Author: Jacob Kahn

Publisher: Roof Books (2022)

Discover an exciting literary talent in Jacob Kahn, the Californian poet whose debut full-length collection engages with classical antiquity as a way to grasp our present moment. Kahn reconsiders the themes, characters, settings, problems, and structures of Virgil’s Eclogues, insisting that the pastoral is political. How may an ancient court poet's musing about shepherds and dispossession sing to us relevantly? Kahn provokes, “lyric continuity is the provision of militaries.”

Don’t worry, this book doesn't require you to brush up on your Virgil to enjoy it, although you'll probably feel afterward compelled in that direction. Smart yet chill, the poet forges intertextual connections with improvisational ease. Readers will find this an accessible conversation with a friendly guy at the bar who “can list the names of birds and trees.” (And really, “what else would a true love want??”)

In poems with broad frames of reference, Kahn sharply confronts the technocratic blight of contemporary San Francisco, where “the processes of exploitation, in effect, dissolve into the landscape.” Our fragile and mediated relationship to the land might prove the searing truth, “You can’t hold what was never your ground.” Like Virgil, when in doubt Kahn looks to his friends, whom he duly celebrates.

The poems in Mine Eclogue attend to the idyllic panorama and lyric minutiae of life in the modern heart of empire. Engaged with a loose lineage of Bay Area pastoralism, these are poems of vantage and habitude, town and city, ownership and eviction, labor and liability, routine and pleasure, ditty and bickering. Roof Books is excited to be supporting the emergence of this important new voice.