Munson, Jed: Vision Sans Seraphim

Beautiful Days Press, chapbook

Publication Date: September 30, 2025

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Vision Sans Seraphim converges around a discrete series of circles: the vocative O of English, the Arabic numeral 0, and the silent Korean letterㅇ. Ciphers for people—the poet’s sister, his mother, and his partner—and the written letter itself, as medium, form a cycle of addressed subjects; apostrophe, numerology, and nullification offer temporary modes of witness in overlapping, protracting states of crisis. Together, the ten poems record collapsed literary sense—the contingencies of voice, vision, and flow in a life shaped by neurological disorders.

"In the singleness of each poem, a multitude, a (re)sounding state of witness as to a snowfall—the mouth forming the O of each body falling through space, and the eye and mind unfolding endlessly through Time. Elegy invents distance to address the beloved and manifest love; to redress the disorienting manyness of loss. In the collapse of elegy’s matter into the immaterial: a Vision Sans Seraphim. So Jed Munson reinvents the English elegy by absorbing lyric apostrophe and consolation into a multilingual multi-verse of anxious experience and lettered sound. The delicate vibrations and broken lines build in harmonic relation to unfold a written score and make a simultaneous performance of/in mind as they build a new scale for a music of the image—in place of direct address, the direct encounter; the now of being for the having been." - Julie Agoos