Eggtooth - jesse nathan

In this debut collection, Jesse Nathan matches an exquisite feeling for the music of lines and sentences with his profound explorations of the idea of home.

The books title comes from the word for a bit of cartilage on a baby birds beak, a growth that helps it break out of the egg.

Shortly after the bird hatches, the tooth disappears.

Like an eggtooth, Nathans poems are often figures for birth, for the violence of birth and, in his case, rebirth.

They follow an unusual and passionate boy from his childhood on a wheat farm in the watershed of the Running Turkey Creek in rural southcentral Kansas -- the land was always the solace -- to his life years later in a coastal city.

Ecology, family, history, sexuality, and poetry itself are his subjects, but in all these matters, Nathans rich formal imagination travels our fundamental feelings of alienation and belonging.

In a style somehow both lavish and plainspoken, in free verse and inherited forms, Eggtooth takes us from straw-bale fortresses in the hayloft, from fishing in streams and days so hot the blank road shimmers as the heat drives you out of your straw-frail mind, to the respite and loneliness of a far-off city plaza, to the waves in their folding at the edge where an ocean comes boiling onto sand.

With verbal precision and abiding sympathy, Nathans poems announce a capacious and deeply compelling new voice in American letters.