Jesse Ball
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Jesse Ball
Male
31 years old
Reykjavik
Iceland
Last Login: 11/24/2009
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Jesse Ball's Interests
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| General | Innuit masks, Expensive Chocolate, King's Indian Attack. | | Music | Geechie Wiley. | | Movies | That footage of the red tailed hawk fighting with a rattlesnake. |
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Jesse Ball's Details
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| Status: | Married | | Orientation: | Straight | | Body type: | 6' 0" | | Religion: | Other | | Zodiac Sign: | Gemini | | Occupation: | Verse, Prose |
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Jesse Ball's Latest Blog Entry
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Lester, Burma
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Jesse Ball's Blurbs |
About me:
Poet, prose-writer.
Some of my books:
Samedi the Deafness (Vintage 2007)
A novel about a mnemonist trapped in a sanitorium for chronic liars.
Og svo kom nottin (Nyhil 2006)
A book of drawings (w' Thordis Bjornsdottir)
Vera & Linus (Nyhil 2006)
Cruel stories (w' Thordis Bjornsdottir)
March Book (Grove 2004)
First volume of verse.
My work appeared this year in Best American Poetry 2006.
Go to jesseball.com to see more work.
Here are some REVIEWS of my books:
Desales Harrison, BOSTON REVIEW:
The poems in Jesse Ball’s March Book arrive on the scene like strangers from unknown lands, not so much ill at ease as out of context, exhibiting a decorum as peculiar as it is refined. Ball displays an otherworldly virtuosity in rendering the uncanny. But while his poems’ characters, stories, and settings resemble those of fairy tales, they only resemble them; the poems are too oblique to lay claim to a single moral, and instead they stand as fragments of an imaginary world unassimilable into the proprieties of coherent narrative.
If what Ball writes are allegories, they are allegories like those crafted by Franz Kafka and Pieter Breughel the Elder (from whose drawing on the book cover masked, hooded beekeepers facelessly peer). Rather than indicating the nature toward which humankind could strive, they illustrate the darker forces and negotiations that have their place in our psyches and societies. So a characteristic Ball poem is perhaps less an allegory than what remains of the allegorical once its referents, its insistence upon one interpretation or another, have been burned or pared away. What is left is a residuum of precise, elemental, iconic detail, not detail rendered to make manifest the thingly specificity of the world, but detail both concrete and bizarre, the sort of detail from which our dreams are compounded.
For the sound a mouth makes
is twofold—
bent in arriving, stooped in the hall
in a corridor of doorways, each sound
is the servant not of the will alone,
not of will, but of the quieted
intents we have forgotten, that left us
at the moment of waking,
making their way, in cold determination, along the
brittle roads of our sharpest sight.
What is to be revealed in such a poetry are not the identities and relations of these forgotten “quieted intents” but the pressure they exert, the cold determinations they enforce—inexplicable, creepy, unflinching—from the borders of rational consciousness.
If it is true, as Yeats said, that “in dreams begins responsibility,” what remains to be established in Ball’s work is a sense of what responsibilities his luminous, arresting, uncanny dreamscapes call the reader toward. Ball’s work will reach its full power—already precociously anticipated in this rich, overflowing volume—when it addresses the pressing question of what sort of ethical objective is implied by the coolly seductive and skillfully wrought objects he has made.
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (Vera & Linus)
In this unusual collection of what are arguably prose poems, sketches or pieces of flash fiction, husband and wife Ball (March Book, 2004) and Björnsdottir introduce a charming yet gruesome pair of protagonists: Vera and Linus. They are childlike, living in a world where giving presents and playing are top priority, but they are also devoted lovers and perhaps siblings. Their twisted fairy tale world is as magical as it is disturbing: in it, a treasure chest opens up to reveal an entire lake inside, and children and animals are tortured for the protagonists' amusement. Episodes of violence ("Vera and Linus broke the dog's neck and put the body into a brown canvas bag which they tied neatly with great satisfaction") are often sewn seamlessly into scenes of fanciful beauty: "...their sorrows were carried away... to the court of the sea-king, and dined on there to much acclaim...." The light touch and often archaic feel of the prose owes as much to Kafka as to classic fairy tales. Certainly many readers will find this book unsettling, but most will also find it hard not to remember a time when the world was filled with this kind of fearful mystery and wonder, though hopefully not this kind of violence.
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Who I'd like to meet:
Paul Morphy, Manfred von Richtofen
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