Winter Stranger

Poems

By: Jackson Holbert

Narrated by: Jackson Holbert

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.

In the cold seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.

Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.

“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.

©2023 Jackson Holbert (P)2023 Milkweed Editions

Critic reviews

“Holbert’s poems are emotionally generous. They blend accessible language with imagery that feels familiar yet beguilingly strange.“—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle

“Winter Stranger uses spare language to portray a Washington countryside beset by hopelessness and addiction”—Library Journal, What to Read in 2023

[Winter Stranger] is teeming beneath its plainspoken surface, like fish under lake ice. [. . .] I’m certain this is just the start of a long poetry career for Holbert.—Kristen Steenbeeke, Texas Monthly

Masterful

Jackson’s poems evoke the work of Franz Wright and Rilke but also announce a wholly new voice in American poetry. The river, the snow, the pills… there is violence here and also mercy, a kind of generosity and humor that flow out of a close attention to death and loss. I recommend pausing the recording in between each poem, and reading it with the physical version of the text nearby. I will be thinking about these poems for a long time. Winter Stranger is a masterclass on how to end a poem! I loved living inside the landscape of this book, and I plan to relisten to this book and read whatever Jackson writes next.