My father’s ghost opens a Bud and says, “They’re lucky to get three meals a day.” The clock struck half past my lifetime hours ago. Bacon sizzles in the frying pan, filling the kitchen with the aroma of sodium nitrate. Lost in America’s slush pile, I look back on a wasted afternoon Rants of a Cranky Old Man: on Politics, Writing, and Personal Struggles is Jon Wesick’s misanthropically aged 4th book collection with Alien Buddha Press, and it reads like a life measured in decades of effort colliding with indifference. Following Explaining Humanity to Electrons, Reductio ad Absurdum, and Saint John the Blasphemer, Wesick sharpens his voice into something both weary and unrelenting. Hundreds of Jon Wesick’s poems and stories have appeared in journals, but here the focus narrows to the cost of endurance. In poems where it takes ten years to earn a Ph.D. in physics only to be thrown on the trash heap of unemployment, and where human damage counts less than the bottom line, the personal becomes political without losing its sting. He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire and longs for gene editing to bring giant wombats back from extinction, a strange, fitting echo of survival against the odds. cover art Hans Holbein (1523)
