In Debris Jonathan Wells is concerned by the tension between the internal world of the lyric and an external world of violence and intrusion. Following this conflict through poems of rumination, imagination and increasing threat, the book resolves in a eulogy that is simple and touching. In one of the opening poems, “Notes from the Invasion”, the speaker asserts, “The worst has happened. There is nothing/to imagine,”. The collection as a whole asks us to consider the questions: without imagination, what is left of the poem and the mind in a time of catastrophe? How are we to find peace? Experience love? Wells invites us to join him in the lyric’s journey, to shelter in reading, and to travel in the imagination in order to protect the self from danger and risk without denial.

Jonathan Wells is the author of two previous collections of poetry with Four Way Books: The Man with Many Pens (2015) and Train Dance (2011). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, AGNI, Bennington Review, and many other journals. He is a co-editor of the New World Translation Series with Christopher Merrill and lives in New York.