photo courtesy: RAGGA NYC
Joey De Jesus is the author of HOAX Limited Artist Edition (Operating System, 2022), and chapbooks: We Animate the Dream: A Poet’s Run for Public Office (Mount Analog Political Pamphlet Series II, 2021) and NOCT- The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019). Joey received the 2019-20 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission and 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry for HOAX. Poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, Artists Space, Barrow Street, Bettering American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, The New Museum, The Newtown Literary Review, and elsewhere. Joey is a co-editor at Apogee Journaland sits on the advisory board of No, Dear Magazine. Joey lives in Ridgewood where they ran a socialist, abolitionist campaign for New York State Assembly District 38 garnering nearly 25% of the vote. To learn more about Joey’s campaign, visit DeJesus2020.com.
POETRY
- HOAX [SPELLS, SCROLL, DECK, MAP] (Operating System, 2022)
- A hoax is a trick but a trick that is successful because it could almost be real. In times and days when the ‘almost’ between the real and irreal evaporates, species vanish and the air and water themselves tremble with imminent danger, shamans and diviners of great commitment must the earth enter. Then too all language is a hoax that asks you to believe one thing over another, one reality as victor and others as banished, shadow certainties, less certain, less believed. Ghosts come into Joey’s book but not ghosts, sound, and not a book but a chthonic demand, a word or re-ordering of perceptual reality by a verbal art of the greatest commitment to soul and personhood. I find the most local beauty in these epic poems, epic in their hope and ambition, daily in their attentions. I think Joey must have magic powers: to be a poet of such love and precision yet also be a warrior-angel-daimon yet also be a deliberate and careful and strategic community builder and activist. Aren’t these qualities divergent? All things come together in this HOAX, an accomplished work that enables all who read and encounter to be transformed.
- Kazim Ali, author of several books of poetry and cross-genre work including: Inquisition (Wesleyan), Sky Ward (Wesleyan), The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions), All One’s Blue (Harper Collins India); The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books) and his memoir, Northern Light (Milkweed Editions).
- One doesn’t read HOAX–it spills into you. Holding and moving through this feral, magical punk odyssey was like tonguing rough glyphs etched into a mirror, then discovering my body’s outline at the bottom of an oil slicked, holy pond. Joey’s magic serves to make meaning in a world where our interconnectedness is effaced or turned against us; they reclaim mystery for our daily selves, with epiphanic gusto alerting us to honor the wild essence of life. Grief, desire, and outrage evaginate into a portal they draw us through where we can read signs in the sky, down their navel, in the complex detritus of the environment–and find ourselves brightly contiguous with the apocryphal. Joey’s celestographs invited me to rediscover stargazing with wild wonder. My unfathomable child spirit quickened with this text. If there’s a hoax to HOAX, I prefer Joey’s beautiful deception of being audaciously alertly alive.
- Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of Solar Maximum (Futurepoem), No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise, (Kore Press) and Aerial Concave Without Cloud (forthcoming from Nightboat Books).
- Joey De Jesus returns poetry to its ancient divinatory powers in this extraordinary new work: “we are talking fog,” says the poet, says the soothsayer. 108 is an equation from the present to the present whenever it enters itself, gifted back to us in these poems. The poetics of abolition requires care for others, and here is the poet to show us how mindfulness of such an order has the same tender approach in the magic of song.
- CAConrad, author of nine books of poetry and essays, including JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals (Ignota Books), While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books), and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books).
- Poems from HOAX, several of which have been revised or retitled, first appeared in the following journals, books and periodicals: “The Land God Made in Anger” and “letters from Maun, Botswana” appear in Antiphon; “Contours of the Reed Field” and “Scorpio” appear in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry; “the 8-point buck” and “bigger than the moon” appear in Bedfellows; “self-portrait as queen of adders” appears in Beloit Poetry Journal; “Celestogram of Jupiter” appears in Black Rabbit Review; “Slow Magic,” “Materia VIII” and “On the day marking the second year of drought” appear in Blunderbuss Magazine; “Materia III” appears in Brooklyn Magazine; An except “from VANTABLACK” appears in The Brooklyn Rail; “Hurricane Irene” appears in The Cortland Review; “Self-portait at 24: A Triptych” appears in Devil’s Lake; “Drought in the Midwest” appears in Dislocate; “Sadalsuud” appears in The Encyclopedia of Things, a book of photography and poetry, photographed and curated by Elisabeth Smolarz; “malignant catarrhal fever” appears in Guernica; “Exorcism of the Ritual Gristle Piece” appears in Jellyfish Magazine; “white flag” appears in Madcap Review (2015 Pushcart nomination); “Eastchester Bay [ending in an offering]” appears in Nepantla; “Catalog” appears in The Nervous Breakdown, “for the meteor that crashed in Glenwood Landing”, “Catalog 2” and “Poetry-in-Motion” appear in Newtown Literary Review; “ghost” appears in Perfect Wave, alongside “Meditations on Flight” and “the Return of Guabancex”; “white laboring class” appears in A Portrait in Blues, an Anthology of Poetry (Platypus Press), edited by jayy dodd; “the home invasion” appears in Powder Keg; A handwritten draft of “Fomalhaut” was installed in the group show RAGGA NYC: All the Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another at the New Museum (2017); “Black Mamba Molt” appears in RHINO; “Dark Vault”, “Conjuring Hismael”, “Roll Cloud”, and “Grass Widow” in Rivulet, f.k.a. Killing Fields; “Of 36 Options Departure is Best” takes its titles from a euphemism in the 14th Century Chinese Classic Water Margin by Shi Nai’an and appears in The Shade Journal; “abandonment before the salt pan (& the sandstorm)” appears in Southern Humanities Review; The poems “booze blessing incantation“, “materia XV”, and “self-portrait as leviathan who registers time in millenia” appear in Susan: the Journal; “autosacrifice”, “Materia IX” and “Materia 0” appear in Symmetries: Three Years of Art and Poetry at Dominique Lévy; “Materia XVII” and “Materia XIX” appear in Talk Magazine, printed in gold and cobalt ink, they feature illustrations by Alexis Beauclair; “On the Day Neil Armstrong Died” appears in Versal; “Atlas”, “Alhena” and “Merak” first appear in my nonfiction chapbook, We Animate the Dream: A Poet’s Run for Public Office (Mount Analogue Political Pamphlet Series II) with special thanks to Patty Gone for encouraging and publishing this work; “Materia VII” appears in WILDNESS (2016 Pushcart Nominee). “Plethora” was written in collaboration with Sammy Roth and Brittany “B” Taylor. “Plethora” was included in Writing Voice into the Archive, edited by Jennifer Tamayo with support from UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.
- NOCT- The Threshold of Madness was selected and published as a chapbook by The Atlas Review (2019). Excerpts of NOCT: The Threshold of Madness appears in Anomaly (f.k.a. Drunken Boat), Bettering American Poetry vol. 2 and The Literary Review. I posted scans of the erasures online. The “erased” book of blackout poems was installed at Artists Space for Pride Goes Before a Fall / Beware a Holy Whore / Mise en Abyme and performed 7/26/2016.
- A hoax is a trick but a trick that is successful because it could almost be real. In times and days when the ‘almost’ between the real and irreal evaporates, species vanish and the air and water themselves tremble with imminent danger, shamans and diviners of great commitment must the earth enter. Then too all language is a hoax that asks you to believe one thing over another, one reality as victor and others as banished, shadow certainties, less certain, less believed. Ghosts come into Joey’s book but not ghosts, sound, and not a book but a chthonic demand, a word or re-ordering of perceptual reality by a verbal art of the greatest commitment to soul and personhood. I find the most local beauty in these epic poems, epic in their hope and ambition, daily in their attentions. I think Joey must have magic powers: to be a poet of such love and precision yet also be a warrior-angel-daimon yet also be a deliberate and careful and strategic community builder and activist. Aren’t these qualities divergent? All things come together in this HOAX, an accomplished work that enables all who read and encounter to be transformed.
- Uncollected poems appear in the Academy of American Poets POEM-A-DAY series, 2016 Argos Poetry Calendar, Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Barrow Street, BOAAT Journal (Printed and translated by Kenneth Cumba for Puerto Rico en mi Corazón & republished in Anomaly), LUMINA (2012 Contest-winner, judged by Carolyn Forche), Madcap Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Newtown Literary Review (2018 Pushcart nominee), No, Dear Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, SxSalon and The Volta.
NONFICTION
- “We Animate the Dream”: A Poet’s Run for Public Office (Mount Analogue Political Pamphlet Series II, 2021) [TEXT]
PROMESA: An Essay (In-Progress) on Blackout Poetics- “We’ve Learned To Call This Normal” Papermag
- “Goldsmith, Conceptualism and the Half-baked Rationalization of White Idiocy”
- Named 2015’s Transformative Literary Essays by Sundress Publications.
- Letter from the Editors: The Politics of “Blind Submission” Policies Apogee Journal
- Conversation: “Publish, Perish, Other: A Talk-Back (Part 1)” w/ Muriel Leung, Apogee Journal
- Roundtable: Editor Roundtable VIDA: Women in Literature
- Roundtable: “Young Poets Bare All, What is a Culture?” Harriet: Blog of the Poetry Foundation
- Interview with La Bloga: The world’s longest-established Chicana Chicano, Latina Latino literary blog
- Interview with Writerly States [5-part interview with Jen Werner]
- On the Occasion of my Cousin’s Wedding
REFERENCES
- Jess Barbagallo, “The Wheels of Joey” for ArtForum June 10, 2020
- Heather Milne, Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.
- Marjorie Perloff, “What Really Happened? Kenneth Goldsmith’s “7+ Deaths and Disasters,” Sophie Calle’s, Take Care of Yourself”, Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, Vol. 0, 2018
- Urayoán Noel, “Diasporican Poets Mixtape 2” Harriet: Blog of the Poetry Foundation. Sept. 13, 2016
- John Rufo, “The Best Poem I Read This Month: Joey De Jesus’s ‘Materia VII‘” Ploughshares Blog, Aug. 18, 2016
- Jen Hofer, “If You Hear Something Say Something, Or If You’re Not At The Table You’re On The Menu“ Entropy Magazine. Dec. 18, 2015
- Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, “The Whitest Boy Alive: Witnessing Kenneth Goldsmith” Harriet: Blog of the Poetry Foundation. May 18, 2015
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- 2019-2020 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission, HOAX
- 2019 TAR Chapbook Contest Winner NOCT: The Threshold of Madness
- 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry; Gregory Millard Fellowship
- 2017 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize Finalist
- Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
EDUCATION
- M.A. New York University (Performance Studies)
- Departmental Fellow
- M.F.A. Sarah Lawrence College (Poetry)
- B.A. Oberlin College
***Electronic Press Kit 2019***
Joey De Jesus 