Jonathan Weinert | Biography

Jonathan Weinert grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and has lived in Massachusetts for most of his life. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program.

Jonathan's first book, In the Mode of Disappearance, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2006 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Nightboat Books will publish the book in April 2008.

Jonathan's poems and reviews appear in many journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, LIT, 32 Poems, Memorious, Green Mountains Review, Notre Dame Review, and Third Coast.

Jonathan has many years of experience editing, designing, and producing books and web sites. He serves as web editor for the letterpress literary journal Tuesday; An Art Project, as a poetry editor for Perihelion, and as an interdisciplinary advisor at the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

> Contact Jonathan at jweinert@comcast.net

from "In the Mode of Disappearance"

Suppose you want an absence, as you do.
It isn’t fatal but it’s dangerous,
it’s taxing for your neighbors building lean-tos
on the marshy fringes of your tendency
to have so many selves, each one a point
that you keep making in both argument
and space, distorting the continuum
exactly as the theory predicated.
You want, and want, and there it is, you need,
and that engenders turbulence perceived
as thing: a hurricane inside a house.
The weather changes, but it is; along
the sound a lexicon of uncoined words,
a payroll whose accounts are overdue.
Suppose you close the screenhouse windows, still
you’re less concerned with what to say than how
to say it, as it isn’t written in
the manifest, whose products pink the sea.