Mine Eclogue

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.” In poems with broad frames of reference, Jacob Kahn sharply confronts the technocratic blight of contemporary San Francisco, where “ the processes of exploitation, in effect, dissolve into the landscape.” 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.