Beloff, Jared: Who Will Cradle Your Head

ELJ Editions, paperback

Publication Date: February 10, 2023

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In this debut collection, Jared Beloff explores the sorrow and anxieties of living and parenting in a world on fire. He paints a vivid and often surreal portrait of loss, denial, the beauty of nature and the sublime relationship between a father and his children.

“In Who Will Cradle Your Head, Jared Beloff treats language with the same attentiveness with which he regards the Earth and its inhabitants—revealing a cradling consciousness, and the courage to love a dying world. The bird collector lays out the bodies of dead birds ‘in lines like ruffled silver, a tide of feathers.’ Deer ‘lift their black eyes from foraging,’ and ‘mustard grass and clover / spread like muslin over loss.’ In a remarkable sequence of poems, Sasquatch, the mythic human/animal hybrid, speaks with an instinctive intelligence, and from the lyric intensity of ‘our grief / which is also hope.’ These poems enact an acuity of tenderness that is rare in contemporary poetry.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“In Jared Beloff’s spectral book, the poet contemplates the enormity of climate change by noting the minute particulars of the natural world, and by shaping poems that square the fate of the planet with the life of the poet’s own child who is invoked here with great tenderness, but whose fate must be imagined alongside our terrible knowledge of environmental catastrophe. Who Will Cradle Your Head is a book of hard truths, but it is also one that shows us how to conceive an alternate future in which Florida is under water, ice exists in museums, and Sasquatch sees the ocean for the first time. There are no easy consolations on offer—just the cool hand of poetry held to the warming world.” —Mark Wunderlich, author of The God of Nothingness

“In Jared Beloff’s newest collection, Who Will Cradle Your Head, poems braid themselves between the environmental crisis, fatherhood, Sasquatch, and visual poems written for the eye and soul. These are poems that are tender and fierce, poems that look at the world around us and show how reality whistles/in our faces. The strength of this collection is how we seamlessly move from last night’s broadcast discussing climate anxiety/was interrupted by the magnolias dying outside to Sasquatch seeing the ocean for the first time. Beloff is not afraid to play with poetry, to visually respond to the world on fire around us and to continue to make us want to turn the page. These insightful yet grounded poems make you think and feel, showing us the natural world and ourselves with both spirit and candor.” —Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides

Poetry. Environmental Studies.