Abide

Cover

ABIDE POEMS BY JAKE ADAM YORK POETRY “In his body of work, poems of sheer beauty, grace, precision of image, and technical skill, we find a profound intervention into our ongoing conversations about race and social justice, a bold and necessary challenge to our historical amnesia. Jake Adam York is one of our most indispensible American poets, and the presence of his work in the world—his vision, his enduring spirit—is for me, and I think for us all, a guiding light.”—NATASHA TRETHEWEY, United States Poet Laureate “Jake Adam York was the finest elegist of his generation, and his ongoing project, an intricately layered threnody for the martyrs of the civil rights movement, also made him one of the most ambitious poets of that generation. And surely his early and sudden death was an immense loss to the poetry of our moment. It is thus bittersweet to observe that this posthumous collection is his finest—informed by a tender lyric acuity, and an ability to interweave the fraught history of his native South with an autobiographical authority that is searching and celebratory by turns. Abide is, in short, a marvel.”—DAVID WOJAHN Until his untimely death in December 2012, JAKE ADAM YORK was an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, where he founded and edited the journal Copper Nickel. He published three books of poems, Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings, and Persons Unknown, and his poems appeared in various journals, including Blackbird, Diagram, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, H_NGM_N, New Orleans Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. CRAB ORCHARD SERIES IN POETRY Printed in the United States of America cover illustration: pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines; copyright © 2005 by Jeroen Diepenmaat cover design: Erin Kirk New SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS www.siupress.com YORK ABIDE SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS sarah skeen York cvr mech.indd 1 1/8/14 4:19 PM ...