‘You are grieving at the bar’ begins one of the poems in a book as intimate as it is incantational. In many ways, these words offer a microcosm for Jake Wild Hall’s Blank: a song of shared loss, anaesthetising ‘solutions’, quiet recovery. With the immediacy of a camera lens, these poems bear out the internal conflict between the vulnerability of hope and the safety of detachment. Language soars and contracts: reaching out in prayer—‘london is the world until it sings all the wrong hymns in your church’, down into the body—‘the things i have been avoiding turn to ulcers in my mouth’. Blank doesn’t have all the answers, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a better talisman as you ask the questions.
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“An antidote to toxic masculinity, Hall’s poems combine the pure, the delicate and the banal, conjuring a luxurious and enveloping language of hope. Beneath the sparsity and simplicity, the poems invite a deeper meditation on what it is to emerge from chaos into something newer and more life-affirming.” Melissa Lee-Houghton
“I would give anything to be able to write in such a way that hope becomes something that is utilised instead of compromised. Its power can be difficult to control, especially for those without it. Put to good use, as Hall does so perfectly in these poems, hope becomes a glowing totem around which all the horrors of the world must orbit at a distance. Here, acceptance is examined as closely as grief and mental illness, and it is that acceptance which left me feeling I had read a truly important work. Hall slows everything down to a faint heartbeat, forcing us to lean in closer, to properly hear the music of his being, and in turn the music of our own. BLANK is a gesture of intimacy, a remedy of sorts for lost souls like me, and reading these poems makes me feel more human, more willing to be accepting and kinder to myself. Money can’t buy such revelations. Only art can. Only poetry like this can. My ear to the cover of this intimate collection, to the chest of Hall’s experience, listening to the steady thump of love in transition.” Bobby Parker