nostraDAMus 2032, poetry by Jason Arias
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-78-3
If a writer appropriates the mantle of one of the most celebrated visionaries of all time, he had best deliver – and in this debut poetry collection, Jason Arias does. In the closing line of the title poem he is exhorted to “Now wake up, for real. And write this down…” Whether he is awake or not may be in question, for this phantasmagoric explosion of a book reads more like a dream than any waking world, but he certainly has written it all down, every fractured and fractalized aspect of contemporary life, in poetry that twists and trails all over the page, daring the reader to keep pace with his imagination. In lieu of toads his poetic garden contains the “toothless / warnings and zombie / survival skills” of summer horror movies (many of which inspire his visions), depicting a world where the second coming was always on the way but “We just never suspected it would be so beautiFULLY / DIGIT / ALIZED.” Just when it all seems too much, the “tidal pull” of his closing poem returns us to the comfort of conventional stanzas, describing a tender moment where “your sideways smile / either meant you were mad teasing or mad serious /… / and the space between us lessened / and the dawn was closing in” – treating us to the “clear viSions of the END” promised in his subtitle. It’s a lovely awakening from his fever dream.
Praise for Jason Arias & nostraDAMus 2032
Jason Arias’ debut collection is a psilocybin road trip back to the old neighborhood. nostraDamus 2032 is a midnight visit to the crossroads where “the antes and the aunties” settle up. Each poem is a scenic rest stop overlooking the natural splendor of redwood forests, horror movies, and Tupac lyrics. Throughout this “cobwebbed museum of lost lies and new thangs” Arias’ writing is playful and keen like fortune cookie freestyle cranked from a boombox in a temple.
—Shawnte Orion, author of Gravity & Spectacle
Arias opens this collection with epigraphs from William Blake, Carl Sagan, Eminem, and The Evil Dead so it’s no surprise that this wild ride bursts with playful ingenuity but never shies away from darkness or sacrifices empathy. Beneath the inventive rhythms of these poems you’ll find the bass beat of a curious and tender human heart.
—Tracy Burkholder, author of I Want More
So much poetry reads like it was written by a poet looking to impress other poets. Jason Arias isn’t like that. He’s not punishing you for skipping class, he’s not putting on stage makeup. His only motive is to hand you a book of poems that’ll make you feel something. Poetry that’s artistic without being pretentious. It’s serious, but it can take a joke. It’s modern, but it’s not trying to outrun you. It’s not afraid or ashamed to be poetry, and it’s also warm and inviting. This book is for you, reader.
—Peter Derk, author of Dear Runaway: a novel in letters
Jason Arias’s uniquely composed nostraDAMus 2032 had me pondering relationships: to ourselves, to each other, and to the world—especially the digital world and where it is bringing us. I am a fan of genre-bending and experimentation with language, and I loved this collection because it does this down to each letter, concisely and conscientiously, to explore these relationships. This book brings to mind the important question of how we navigate this modern world; it is a journey for the mind and the heart.
—Zaji Cox, author of Plums for Month
In a series of post-apocalyptic ennui poems, Jason Arias channels prophecies of everyday singularity. nostraDAMus 2032 speaks to our quotidian tech present (and future and past) with a tragic humor that is at its core generous and accepting, acknowledging both the base-desire dopamine hits we as humans crave and the ever-loving consciousnesses we wish to become.
—Joshua James Amberson, author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes
Jason Arias’ nostraDAMus dances on the page to a fast-paced and syncopated rhythm channeling pieces of our collective pandemic worry and ennui. Wielding word and text play deftly, Arias works the page like an 80s house DJ, weaving together disparate pop culture samples—from Tupac and Stone Temple Pilots to Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko—with owls, sequoias, antidepressants, stargazing, mushroom trips, post-apocalyptic possibilities, deep love, and waves of loss. In a voice both intimate and impassioned, these poems are songs of rumination, of people and places long gone, but too, they are hymns to beauty that endures, in memory, in tree- and coastlines, in the warmth of someone else’s hand in your own. These poems speak of dark days and the small cracks of light that broke through, of fumbling in that long night and then, finally, squinting into the dawn.
—Chelsea Biondolillo, author of The Skinned Bird: Essays
The magic of Jason Arias is his ability to befriend with a word, a sentence, a page. Read any one of his stories and you’ll feel like you’ve known him forever. And such is the case with nostraDAMus 2032, his fiercely unique, fiercely joyous poetry collection, in which Arias continues to astound, amuse, and cut directly to the quick and to the heart. As with his prose, I find myself lingering between the words, between the spaces on the page, in that diffuse golden light Arias casts with his masterful writing. These poems are both vibrant and bold, yet somehow delicate. There is also grief here— a sense of a goodbye, of a closing of the door, and, perhaps, the opening of another. This is an extraordinary work from one of the Pacific Northwest’s finest writers.
—Dustin Hendrick, author of The Endless M
A collection full of ciphers and cheatcodes. Best read aloud, best shouted at a roaring ocean. Or if read quietly, best done on a subway, in a crowded home, a dark closet, or alone in the woods and miles from food and water and kind company. Arias steals us into rooms inside our heads we have not furnished, much less walked into, before he runs and leaves us to figure our own way back out. If a way out is a way at all.
—Jude Brewer, writer and host of The Process
If these pages don't make you want to get up and move your body with the mesmerizing rhythm of the visual tapestry which Jason Arias weaves verse from, then your internal record player needs to be turned over. A full body experience of storytelling transformed through stunning form and masterful callbacks, these poems groove and pull on that core sense of flushed cheeks, of going home, of being human.
—Nicole Jean Turner, author of With Only Which She Could Carry
About the Author
Jason Arias lives in the Pacific Northwest. His debut short story collection Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion was published by Black Bomb Books. His writing has appeared in several magazines and anthologies. For links to more of his work visit JasonAriasAuthor.com.
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-78-3
If a writer appropriates the mantle of one of the most celebrated visionaries of all time, he had best deliver – and in this debut poetry collection, Jason Arias does. In the closing line of the title poem he is exhorted to “Now wake up, for real. And write this down…” Whether he is awake or not may be in question, for this phantasmagoric explosion of a book reads more like a dream than any waking world, but he certainly has written it all down, every fractured and fractalized aspect of contemporary life, in poetry that twists and trails all over the page, daring the reader to keep pace with his imagination. In lieu of toads his poetic garden contains the “toothless / warnings and zombie / survival skills” of summer horror movies (many of which inspire his visions), depicting a world where the second coming was always on the way but “We just never suspected it would be so beautiFULLY / DIGIT / ALIZED.” Just when it all seems too much, the “tidal pull” of his closing poem returns us to the comfort of conventional stanzas, describing a tender moment where “your sideways smile / either meant you were mad teasing or mad serious /… / and the space between us lessened / and the dawn was closing in” – treating us to the “clear viSions of the END” promised in his subtitle. It’s a lovely awakening from his fever dream.
Praise for Jason Arias & nostraDAMus 2032
Jason Arias’ debut collection is a psilocybin road trip back to the old neighborhood. nostraDamus 2032 is a midnight visit to the crossroads where “the antes and the aunties” settle up. Each poem is a scenic rest stop overlooking the natural splendor of redwood forests, horror movies, and Tupac lyrics. Throughout this “cobwebbed museum of lost lies and new thangs” Arias’ writing is playful and keen like fortune cookie freestyle cranked from a boombox in a temple.
—Shawnte Orion, author of Gravity & Spectacle
Arias opens this collection with epigraphs from William Blake, Carl Sagan, Eminem, and The Evil Dead so it’s no surprise that this wild ride bursts with playful ingenuity but never shies away from darkness or sacrifices empathy. Beneath the inventive rhythms of these poems you’ll find the bass beat of a curious and tender human heart.
—Tracy Burkholder, author of I Want More
So much poetry reads like it was written by a poet looking to impress other poets. Jason Arias isn’t like that. He’s not punishing you for skipping class, he’s not putting on stage makeup. His only motive is to hand you a book of poems that’ll make you feel something. Poetry that’s artistic without being pretentious. It’s serious, but it can take a joke. It’s modern, but it’s not trying to outrun you. It’s not afraid or ashamed to be poetry, and it’s also warm and inviting. This book is for you, reader.
—Peter Derk, author of Dear Runaway: a novel in letters
Jason Arias’s uniquely composed nostraDAMus 2032 had me pondering relationships: to ourselves, to each other, and to the world—especially the digital world and where it is bringing us. I am a fan of genre-bending and experimentation with language, and I loved this collection because it does this down to each letter, concisely and conscientiously, to explore these relationships. This book brings to mind the important question of how we navigate this modern world; it is a journey for the mind and the heart.
—Zaji Cox, author of Plums for Month
In a series of post-apocalyptic ennui poems, Jason Arias channels prophecies of everyday singularity. nostraDAMus 2032 speaks to our quotidian tech present (and future and past) with a tragic humor that is at its core generous and accepting, acknowledging both the base-desire dopamine hits we as humans crave and the ever-loving consciousnesses we wish to become.
—Joshua James Amberson, author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes
Jason Arias’ nostraDAMus dances on the page to a fast-paced and syncopated rhythm channeling pieces of our collective pandemic worry and ennui. Wielding word and text play deftly, Arias works the page like an 80s house DJ, weaving together disparate pop culture samples—from Tupac and Stone Temple Pilots to Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko—with owls, sequoias, antidepressants, stargazing, mushroom trips, post-apocalyptic possibilities, deep love, and waves of loss. In a voice both intimate and impassioned, these poems are songs of rumination, of people and places long gone, but too, they are hymns to beauty that endures, in memory, in tree- and coastlines, in the warmth of someone else’s hand in your own. These poems speak of dark days and the small cracks of light that broke through, of fumbling in that long night and then, finally, squinting into the dawn.
—Chelsea Biondolillo, author of The Skinned Bird: Essays
The magic of Jason Arias is his ability to befriend with a word, a sentence, a page. Read any one of his stories and you’ll feel like you’ve known him forever. And such is the case with nostraDAMus 2032, his fiercely unique, fiercely joyous poetry collection, in which Arias continues to astound, amuse, and cut directly to the quick and to the heart. As with his prose, I find myself lingering between the words, between the spaces on the page, in that diffuse golden light Arias casts with his masterful writing. These poems are both vibrant and bold, yet somehow delicate. There is also grief here— a sense of a goodbye, of a closing of the door, and, perhaps, the opening of another. This is an extraordinary work from one of the Pacific Northwest’s finest writers.
—Dustin Hendrick, author of The Endless M
A collection full of ciphers and cheatcodes. Best read aloud, best shouted at a roaring ocean. Or if read quietly, best done on a subway, in a crowded home, a dark closet, or alone in the woods and miles from food and water and kind company. Arias steals us into rooms inside our heads we have not furnished, much less walked into, before he runs and leaves us to figure our own way back out. If a way out is a way at all.
—Jude Brewer, writer and host of The Process
If these pages don't make you want to get up and move your body with the mesmerizing rhythm of the visual tapestry which Jason Arias weaves verse from, then your internal record player needs to be turned over. A full body experience of storytelling transformed through stunning form and masterful callbacks, these poems groove and pull on that core sense of flushed cheeks, of going home, of being human.
—Nicole Jean Turner, author of With Only Which She Could Carry
About the Author
Jason Arias lives in the Pacific Northwest. His debut short story collection Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion was published by Black Bomb Books. His writing has appeared in several magazines and anthologies. For links to more of his work visit JasonAriasAuthor.com.
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-78-3
If a writer appropriates the mantle of one of the most celebrated visionaries of all time, he had best deliver – and in this debut poetry collection, Jason Arias does. In the closing line of the title poem he is exhorted to “Now wake up, for real. And write this down…” Whether he is awake or not may be in question, for this phantasmagoric explosion of a book reads more like a dream than any waking world, but he certainly has written it all down, every fractured and fractalized aspect of contemporary life, in poetry that twists and trails all over the page, daring the reader to keep pace with his imagination. In lieu of toads his poetic garden contains the “toothless / warnings and zombie / survival skills” of summer horror movies (many of which inspire his visions), depicting a world where the second coming was always on the way but “We just never suspected it would be so beautiFULLY / DIGIT / ALIZED.” Just when it all seems too much, the “tidal pull” of his closing poem returns us to the comfort of conventional stanzas, describing a tender moment where “your sideways smile / either meant you were mad teasing or mad serious /… / and the space between us lessened / and the dawn was closing in” – treating us to the “clear viSions of the END” promised in his subtitle. It’s a lovely awakening from his fever dream.
Praise for Jason Arias & nostraDAMus 2032
Jason Arias’ debut collection is a psilocybin road trip back to the old neighborhood. nostraDamus 2032 is a midnight visit to the crossroads where “the antes and the aunties” settle up. Each poem is a scenic rest stop overlooking the natural splendor of redwood forests, horror movies, and Tupac lyrics. Throughout this “cobwebbed museum of lost lies and new thangs” Arias’ writing is playful and keen like fortune cookie freestyle cranked from a boombox in a temple.
—Shawnte Orion, author of Gravity & Spectacle
Arias opens this collection with epigraphs from William Blake, Carl Sagan, Eminem, and The Evil Dead so it’s no surprise that this wild ride bursts with playful ingenuity but never shies away from darkness or sacrifices empathy. Beneath the inventive rhythms of these poems you’ll find the bass beat of a curious and tender human heart.
—Tracy Burkholder, author of I Want More
So much poetry reads like it was written by a poet looking to impress other poets. Jason Arias isn’t like that. He’s not punishing you for skipping class, he’s not putting on stage makeup. His only motive is to hand you a book of poems that’ll make you feel something. Poetry that’s artistic without being pretentious. It’s serious, but it can take a joke. It’s modern, but it’s not trying to outrun you. It’s not afraid or ashamed to be poetry, and it’s also warm and inviting. This book is for you, reader.
—Peter Derk, author of Dear Runaway: a novel in letters
Jason Arias’s uniquely composed nostraDAMus 2032 had me pondering relationships: to ourselves, to each other, and to the world—especially the digital world and where it is bringing us. I am a fan of genre-bending and experimentation with language, and I loved this collection because it does this down to each letter, concisely and conscientiously, to explore these relationships. This book brings to mind the important question of how we navigate this modern world; it is a journey for the mind and the heart.
—Zaji Cox, author of Plums for Month
In a series of post-apocalyptic ennui poems, Jason Arias channels prophecies of everyday singularity. nostraDAMus 2032 speaks to our quotidian tech present (and future and past) with a tragic humor that is at its core generous and accepting, acknowledging both the base-desire dopamine hits we as humans crave and the ever-loving consciousnesses we wish to become.
—Joshua James Amberson, author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes
Jason Arias’ nostraDAMus dances on the page to a fast-paced and syncopated rhythm channeling pieces of our collective pandemic worry and ennui. Wielding word and text play deftly, Arias works the page like an 80s house DJ, weaving together disparate pop culture samples—from Tupac and Stone Temple Pilots to Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko—with owls, sequoias, antidepressants, stargazing, mushroom trips, post-apocalyptic possibilities, deep love, and waves of loss. In a voice both intimate and impassioned, these poems are songs of rumination, of people and places long gone, but too, they are hymns to beauty that endures, in memory, in tree- and coastlines, in the warmth of someone else’s hand in your own. These poems speak of dark days and the small cracks of light that broke through, of fumbling in that long night and then, finally, squinting into the dawn.
—Chelsea Biondolillo, author of The Skinned Bird: Essays
The magic of Jason Arias is his ability to befriend with a word, a sentence, a page. Read any one of his stories and you’ll feel like you’ve known him forever. And such is the case with nostraDAMus 2032, his fiercely unique, fiercely joyous poetry collection, in which Arias continues to astound, amuse, and cut directly to the quick and to the heart. As with his prose, I find myself lingering between the words, between the spaces on the page, in that diffuse golden light Arias casts with his masterful writing. These poems are both vibrant and bold, yet somehow delicate. There is also grief here— a sense of a goodbye, of a closing of the door, and, perhaps, the opening of another. This is an extraordinary work from one of the Pacific Northwest’s finest writers.
—Dustin Hendrick, author of The Endless M
A collection full of ciphers and cheatcodes. Best read aloud, best shouted at a roaring ocean. Or if read quietly, best done on a subway, in a crowded home, a dark closet, or alone in the woods and miles from food and water and kind company. Arias steals us into rooms inside our heads we have not furnished, much less walked into, before he runs and leaves us to figure our own way back out. If a way out is a way at all.
—Jude Brewer, writer and host of The Process
If these pages don't make you want to get up and move your body with the mesmerizing rhythm of the visual tapestry which Jason Arias weaves verse from, then your internal record player needs to be turned over. A full body experience of storytelling transformed through stunning form and masterful callbacks, these poems groove and pull on that core sense of flushed cheeks, of going home, of being human.
—Nicole Jean Turner, author of With Only Which She Could Carry
About the Author
Jason Arias lives in the Pacific Northwest. His debut short story collection Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion was published by Black Bomb Books. His writing has appeared in several magazines and anthologies. For links to more of his work visit JasonAriasAuthor.com.