MINE ECLOGUE
by Jacob Kahn
Discover an exciting literary talent in Jacob Kahn, the Californian poet whose debut full-length collection engages with classical antiquity as a way to grasp our present moment. Kahn reconsiders the themes, characters, settings, problems, and structures of Virgil’s Eclogues, insisting that the pastoral is political. How may an ancient court poet's musing about shepherds and dispossession sing to us relevantly? Kahn provokes, “lyric continuity is the provision of militaries.”
Don’t worry, this book doesn't require you to brush up on your Virgil to enjoy it, although you'll probably feel afterward compelled in that direction. Smart yet chill, the poet forges intertextual connections with improvisational ease. Readers will find this an accessible conversation with a friendly guy at the bar who “can list the names of birds and trees.” (And really, “what else would a true love want??”)
In poems with broad frames of reference, Kahn sharply confronts the technocratic blight of contemporary San Francisco, where “the processes of exploitation, in effect, dissolve into the landscape.” Our fragile and mediated relationship to the land might prove the searing truth, “You can’t hold what was never your ground.” Like Virgil, when in doubt Kahn looks to his friends, whom he duly celebrates.
The poems in Mine Eclogue attend to the idyllic panorama and lyric minutiae of life in the modern heart of empire. Engaged with a loose lineage of Bay Area pastoralism, these are poems of vantage and habitude, town and city, ownership and eviction, labor and liability, routine and pleasure, ditty and bickering. Roof Books is excited to be supporting the emergence of this important new voice.
People Are Saying:
Jacob Kahn’s magnificent first book Mine Eclogue sings in the pastoral-ish tradition of all that’s beautiful and fucked at once. But even the shepherds of antiquity were aware you can’t just write about cheese, sex, and weather—the lords are out there, plotting our diminishment. Mine Eclogue addresses our current predicament with wit, despair, ecstasy, and courage. I’m taking it with me to the verdant vale where we daydream the lord’s gory disappearance together, mapping beauty’s victory lap.
—Brandon Brown
It’s as if the plaintive and artful shepherds imagined by Virgil in an era of plebeian labor, epidemic disease, and land expropriations are roles reassigned to the milieu of poets and friends in the Bay in the Trump and Covid years. In a poetics in which “the base lyric is dispossession,” you can “see ash on the Prius” and “alpine flowers / on Ricola’s Originals,” you can “pour one out for emolument.” I can’t think of another book in which the pastoral has been so knowledgeably upbraided and reanimated. That Mine Eclogue is also a blast to read is a testament to Jacob Kahn’s embodied musicality, deft touch, arresting candor, and infectious will to community.
—Brian Blanchfield
As Virgil does in his own Eclogues, Jacob Kahn begins his book with the dirty fact of eviction. “But this is the persistent riff of modernity,” he says, no less than hard historical fact (“Standing Rock/anyone?”). The parallels between the Roman confiscations of Virgil’s time and disasters perpetrated now by the owning classes don’t need to be exact to be glaring. “In the sinking light of history,” these poems register the bad place we find ourselves in, but they do it with great beauty and affection for particulars—“a slight febreeze of sunlight,” “the wigeon in cattails,/the carbon in karst.”
—Jean Day
About the Author:
Jacob Kahn is a poet and editor living in Oakland, CA. He is the author the chapbooks A Is For Aegis, Mine Eclogue and A Circuit of Yields. From 2016–2020, he was a managing editor, curator, and bookseller at Wolfman Books, a bookstore, small press, and community arts hub in downtown Oakland. In 2018, he was a fellow at Epicenter in Green River, UT, a rural design studio and community-based artist residency. He is an editor of the poetry chapbook press, Eyelet Press, which he cofounded with Sophia Dahlin in 2019, and currently works as a freelance grant writer and copyeditor, and as a library aide at the Berkeley Public Library.