My cousin Justin is in town this week from New Jersey, and we’re going to be interviewed together on the radio tomorrow evening (Thursday) on the LivingArt program on KPFT, Houston’s Pacifica radio station. The show starts at 6:00 and goes for an hour, though I don’t know what time our segment will be. If you can’t hear it live, you can hear it later for a while on their website. I hope you can tune in; the show is always lots of fun.

Here tonight is one of the poems from Justin’s book, Exchangeable Bonds, which came out last year from Hanging Loose Press.

Four Negronis in Singapore

When one thinks that recorded human history
has taken not more than seven or eight weeks,
and that even our sun, though an immense ball
of party talk, is a pygmy beside most of the furniture,
the figures of remotely viewed people begin to dwarf
this country’s houses into comparative insignificance.
The farthest source of commentary
that can be seen with the naked eye
this afternoon is a faint splotch
available in a few university libraries
so far away that its import takes a million
episodes to traverse the intervening glasses
of cool relief and fan-conditioned conquests.

***

Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds (2018, Hanging Loose Press) and has published poems and commentary in many journals and online publications. He is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. He studied poetry at Columbia University and the UMass Amherst MFA program. He grew up in Houston, TX and now lives in Montclair, NJ.