White, Rancourt crystalizes the modern sublime through intelligent, complicated, and elegiac modes of inquiry through the plights and heights of the human body. “Harnessing new visions from the traditions of Mark Doty and James L. I admire the great tenderness these poems convey toward those who preceded them and how, in Rancourt’s hands, hauntings become inheritances worth having, even in a world on fire.” Rancourt’s lyrics alert us both to time’s layers and to the wonder of its elasticity. Navigating the powerful undertow of amnesia and a future that has already passed by, Jacques J. “Delving into the nature of memory, both cultural and emotional, the poems of Brocken Spectre are sharp, dauntless, and unflinchingly lucid. Erica Charis-Molling, Los Angeles Review ”The poems in this collection shift position and bend the light, wrestling with what to believe of the rainbow promises of ‘never again.’” “Like weather, Rancourt’s poetry becomes an indelible force of nature, one which may not save lives but which we cannot forsake, which thunders and sings, lashes and lingers.” Amie Whittemore, Southern Indiana Review “who are we to make sense of other people’s loving? And who is the speaker to do so? I think that is what these heart-rending, beautiful poems are most curious about: as both personal and collective traumas are examined, held up to the light, yet seen perpetually through a mist, it is not so much clarity that is manifested but wonderment: it is a wonder, though sometimes terrible, that we are what we are, that we do what we do. What does it mean to live and love in the wake of a community-rupturing crisis, when a stranger's kiss recalls ‘those men/of our fathers' generation/who'd rendezvous in parks/past dark?’” “‘Who would I have been back then?’ asks the speaker of this aching and astute collection of poems, many of which wrestle with the legacy and intergenerational trauma of AIDS from the point of view of someone born in the pandemic's aftermath. “At Night the Humid Chorus Swells: A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt about his Newest Collection, Brocken Spectre” by Tiffany Troy at Compulsive Reader Rancourt by Divya Mehrish” at Adroit Journal “Haunted, Beloved: A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt” by Michael Colbert over at The Rumpus “Chasm and Connection: An Interview with Jacques J. The speaker, raised in the wake of the AIDS crisis, engages with ideas of belatedness, of looking back to a past that cannot be inhabited, of the ethics of memory, and of the dangers in memorializing and romanticizing tragedy. Set in San Francisco, Brocken Spectre examines the way the past presses up against the present.
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