Jesse’s Bio:
Jesse Patrick Ferguson currently lives in Fredericton with his wife and son. Jesse has published poetry and reviews in ten countries, in both print and online formats. Recently, his poems have appeared in Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire, The Walrus, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry and Harper’s. His work also appears in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry, 2009 and Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. Jesse is a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead, and he plays several musical instruments. In 2009, Freehand Books published his first full-length poetry collection, Harmonics.
Publisher’s Note on Harmonics:
Jesse Patrick Ferguson melds music and words in this compelling debut collection of poetry. Modeled on the harmonic series, carefully placed poems riff on each other and individual words resonate sympathetically, with all the energy and buzz of a firmly plucked mandolin string. Throughout, Ferguson pays playful homage to poetic traditions, infusing age-old forms like the sonnet and the villanelle with an astute and contemporary political sensibility, a unique and fresh aesthetic energy, and a breezy, brazen East Coast swagger. In dense and vivacious language, he tunefully explicates a range of subjects from climate change to rent cheques to various incarnations of love, offering us a tin can telephone to the raucous and beautiful symphony of everyday life.
Anne Simpson on Harmonics: “Jesse Ferguson’s vibrant poetry not only makes music, it is music: in this collection, poems resonate with one another as if they were part of the harmonic series. Here’s a poet who shows us how to put an ear to the world and listen.”
Sample Poem from Harmonics:
Work
Men tickled work beneath the chin,
he shat out pellets for them to burn.
They took pictures of their wives in front of him,
work made abandoned petrol stations of their pride.
The men staged protests at each of his orifices,
work’s belly grumbled like a distant gravel mill.
They drove their picket signs into his hide
with mallets improvised from their fathers’ bones,
he taught them to pronounce Behemoth.
They blew whistles through megaphones
directly into his ears,
but then had to line up for tetanus shots.
Cars on the highway were coerced
to honk if they hate work,
but he had just bought a new iPod.
Finally, the strongest man from each province
was given a bullwhip to lash work and learn ’im,
but like a hippo he’s surprisingly fast on land.
He loped across the Laurentian Shield,
each footfall an open-pit mine, his trail
red and corrosive as nickel tailings.
He built a fleet of supertankers then sailed
it to China, leaving the delegates
whipping Atlantic foam
somewhere on the banks of Nova Scotia.
The long-faced men regrouped at Union Headquarters
where Mr. Speaker offered to let him
eat the soft leather lining of his wallet.
But as work hung up on the conference call
Mr. Speaker’s bullwhip knotted itself to a noose.
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