Reading Jason Schneiderman's poetry is like watching someone walk a large, extravagant animal on a leash: always contained, always unexpected. Even as each line stretches and surprises, Schneiderman is indisputably in control, and his collection Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire highlights this blend of constraint and prodigality.
Fans of Ada Limón and Ross Gay will love this collection, which explores the personal and the universal, even tackling meta issues of craft, as seen in "The Speaker in this Poem." Noting a shift away from persona, what Schneiderman calls "a little wall between me and the reader," he considers the distinction between what is true and what is imaginary in a poem. That wall dissolves in the most vulnerable poems, such as the series of "Gay Divorce" poems, or "Catastrophist," which begins "Your heart doesn't have to break every day" and spools out to illuminate living with anxiety: "I've had three catastrophic thoughts today,/ and none of them seem likely to come true,/ and yet I have been carrying around those fears,/ trying to keep them at bay, pretending I'm not/ panicking over a narrative entirely in my head." Schneiderman applies a deft hand even to such weighty subjects as antisemitism and grief, skating readers through demanding lines, as in "Blood and Soil": "Some find God/ inside me./ I say, Home is/ where the knives are./ What Jew doesn't wander?"
Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire is an arresting collection that sees into all manner of truths, those freighted with darkness and those that emerge in sparkling light. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian