"Reading these poems is like watching a conductor command an orchestra; avery is at once poised and radically vulnerable. What a joy to witness!”
- BILLY-RAY BELCOURT, author of This Wound is a World, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize
“Dantean in scope, number one earth appears as a gloss of texts lost, a linkage of things around us. With ornamentation, repetition, and formal play—bees busy 'being,' 'some-worm-somewhere’s / favorite dirt'—the work remains, at heart, a direct and affected one: 'brackishness / an egret / is comforting in this.' Such lines crawl, oracular, through their precision, determinately, to an 'out there,' seemingly despite the world. It is not that the particular is known, the general unknown, but, we are reminded, exactly the other way around. That even now 'what is most important,' that we must again return to, is the 'shape of orbit / not objects themselves / in orbit.' Let number one earth carry you, concentrically, urgently, there.”
- JOS CHARLES, author of feeld (winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series)
A poem spell aimed at the existence of bodies and trauma, jasper avery’s debut collection of poetry narrates and navigates healing. With great tenderness, number one earth’s desire lies in understanding the worlds we pass through before, during and after we learn to hurt in this life. avery’s poetry longs to make these worlds co-exist, to understand their intersections, what they mean, and seeks to discover which earth we came from, so we can know which earth we’re headed towards.
