Mantic Compost

by Jake Syersak

Putting the human back in its humble if pliable place within our radically intra-dynamic ecology, Mantic Compost reveals the basic element of universal composition to be neither the atom nor anatomy, but relation, “whatever et cetera sows.” As Jake Syersak approaches the world—irrevocably from inside—all things are ambidextrous, an “algebra of one another,” from a moon made of kudzu to the self as a river traversing a cricket’s skull. Wandering among gangly, sinewy lyrics and over expansive, plosive, philosophical prose, the consciousness of these five interlaced series understands that his porous, provisional subjectivity, “my skin all x-ray-y,” is engendered by the astro-bio-othernesses coursing through his veins. As history and futurity impinge on the present, “linking day to day to day to,” Syersak sings our imperiled earth, from Marañon Province to Puget Sound, with astounding drunken wonder and flat, sobering fact.

-Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun : f/11

Jake Syersak’s Mantic Compost tasks itself with composing a poetry adequate to our anxious time of pre-decomposition. Here the psyche is post-composure and the rhyme between semantic and mantic is just a declension fluffing the pillows for the no-longer-estranged bedfellows of planetary decline.

-Magdalena Zurawski, author of The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom

101 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022