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About the Book

Jesse Kuhn’s Cicada Wheel documents the grinding resistance of a poet insisting on dignity in poor, Midwestern America. Obstacles to self-respect populate the poems––class envy, predatory institutions, an unforgiving misogynist culture, workplace alienation, generational dysfunction. In Cicada Wheel these trials ultimately serve to highlight the cathartic function of reading and writing poetry. Through its expression of human complexity and creative desire, poetic practice itself provides the possibility of dignity. Jesse Kuhn’s poems find resistance through syntax, humor, and formal invention, as well as via the soul work of transforming the bewildering, nightmarish experience of contemporary culture into a radical and experimental poetic voice. Cicada Wheel is one assertion of poetry’s effectiveness in warding off America’s spiritual desolation.

Praise

In Cicada Wheel, Jesse Kuhn’s gift to us is a book of poems that manages to balance his singular use of language with an elastic concern for form. Memory, here, is lyrical, and as worldly as an itinerant tree. In the folds of the shadows is something like a light, but his words know how to kick, “dark as a coal miner’s cave collapse / traumatized as a butterfly in the asphalt bloom.” Happily, I’m still wearing their bruise.
—Jeffrey Little, author of The Book of Arcana and The Hotel Sterno