Anyone’s Dust, Jed Myers

“There’s relief in such sudden hurt—it tips a heart back out of the grief-chasm.”

A tender and haunting meditation on war and its harrowing effects, Jed Myers’ Anyone’s Dust indulges in themes of intergenerational trauma, recent tragedies in Eastern European wars, and love’s stubborn persistence despite it all. Lush with lyrical imagery, textured and sensory metaphors, and a devotedly fierce voice, these poems integrate episodic narratives of Myers’ family story with that of a greater geopolitical landscape. Vulnerable and equally potent, Myers writes in varying forms, including sonnets and elegies, about the aftermath of rubble and despair, the complication of “the grief-chasm.” He is, most ardently, focused on what happens after tragedy: the ways that humans continue on with their lives. Anyone’s Dust is an ode to Myers’ family, Jewish heritage and delicately positioned political tensions. From the Tigris to Bakhmut to Gaza, Myers collides the fury of war with the tenderness of love in a collection that is sure to evoke great pain and even greater reflection.

“Jed Myers’ Anyone’s Dust is an urgent but carefully considered collection. Though you sense that these lines are driven by an intense need to define the rough territories that condition the human heart, there is simultaneously a clarity—the kind of well-rendered intricacy that can only rise from patient reflection. Anyone who reads Anyone’s Dust will come away with a renewed understanding of how each life underlines what matters and why.”
-Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto and One Turn Around the Sun

“The poems of Anyone’s Dust mustn’t be read, but rather inhaled and deeply. Jed Myers brings a tenderness and musicality to these lyrics that are obsessed with breath and body, narratively ranging from ancestral trauma to present day anxiety of living in a world inundated with violence. Formally innovative in its conversation with sonnets, duplexes, and contrapuntal, the repetitions, echoes, and refrains sing across time and geography, “to remind you / of what you’ve known, what you are.” It is a beautiful collection that, like breath itself, asks to be returned to again and again.”
-Julia Kolchinsky, author of Parallax and 40 Weeks