Jay Baron Nicorvo's poetry, fiction, nonfiction and criticism have appeared in The Literary Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review and The Believer. He's served on editorial staffs at Ploughshares and at PEN America, the literary magazine of the PEN American Center, and worked for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses [clmp]. He teaches at Western Michigan University, where he is faculty advisor to Third Coast. (Author photo by Thisbe Nissen)
“Deadbeat is disarming in its ability to engage with both the seemingly mundane (untied shoelace? Go Velcro) and the eternal (the screw holding heaven together), often in the same poem (“Deadbeat on High”), often in the same breath, swinging easily between dark comedy and glancing heartbreak. It seems possible that Jay Baron Nicorvo has ingested all the darkness of this life and now breathes fire.”
—Nick Flynn
“Jay Baron Nicorvo's marvelous debut is something of a contemporary epic shot through with paradoxical levity and gravity. Our hero is a sad trickster, a persona for whom the slippery echo of ‘dad’ can be heard each time the name ‘Deadbeat’ is sung, spat or chuckled. These poems explore what it is to be loving and loveless and ultimately give us an irreducible view of our humanity. Deadbeat is a book of joy, melancholy and abiding tenderness.”
—Terrance Hayes
“Make room for Deadbeat on the short shelf of essential mock-epic Poetry Heroes. In this winning first book, Jay Baron Nicorvo's coy and coruscating narrator stands shoulder to shoulder with Ed Dorn's Gunslinger and Marvin Bell's Dead Man, to say nothing of Mr. Bones and John Berryman. With generous helpings of Hopkins, Cummings and Creeley too, these poems provide a literary feast with intelligence and panache to spare.”
—Campbell McGrath
Four Way Books
