Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder

Author: Jed Munson

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2021)

A debut chapbook written in pandemic, Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder is a dispatch at the end of a coming of age, one shrouded by barely-functioning systems of meaning-making and thought. One such system is the poet’s voice: wrangling urgency and buffoonery, seriousness and self-seriousness, it willfully meanders through a collapsing landscape, sounding out litanies, evocations, and alarms.

"Jed Munson's modern, self-conscious maneuvers manage to collage archaic forms of diction with an absolutely contemporary eye on problems of self and language. There's a sense here of bonding hyper-scrutiny, at times word by fragment of word, to riffs of freer monologue. This is a debut full of a detailed energy."

–Richard Price