Book of the Week – Failed States by Peter Jastermsky
Peter Jastermsky’s Failed States ponders societal fissures, environmental calamities, and the brief miracle of human existence. If haiku is traditionally about capturing a moment, Failed States is about moments breaking apart, about the shards that remain. It’s poetry for a world that has stopped pretending things are okay and started asking what’s next. It doesn’t offer solutions; it doesn’t even try. Instead, it points out the cracks in the walls, hands you a magnifying glass, and says, “Here, look closer.”
Jastermsky’s Failed States isn’t just a book; it’s a survival manual for living in the rubble. You won’t leave it feeling uplifted, exactly, but you’ll leave it with a clearer sense of what it means to stand in the middle of a collapsing house and laugh—not because it’s funny, but because laughter is all you’ve got left.
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Below are selected poems from the book and comments and please share your comments about the poems also.
cawing for failed states citizen crow
This one is deceptively straightforward, the kind of poem you could easily skim over and dismiss as merely descriptive if you weren’t paying attention—which is precisely the point. The crow, that infamous scavenger, is not just a stand-in for nature but also for a kind of dark, persistent consciousness, the type that survives whatever apocalypse we humans manage to cook up next.
trolling for shadows every last dream taken
This poem is so sparse it’s practically skeletal, but the bones are doing a lot of heavy lifting. “Trolling for shadows” turns out to be a perfect phrase for the scavenging we all do—digging through the wreckage of our hopes, searching for even the faintest echo of what we used to aspire to.
regime change old font sizes sentenced to hard labor
Peter’s decision to focus on something as banal as font sizes is, of course, deliberate. It’s an absurd image, but it works. The idea of “old font sizes sentenced to hard labor” is such a perfect description of the petty nature of power—how it often concerns itself with cosmetic changes that mean nothing to anyone but those in charge.
nebula a mouth drips with stars
And then there’s this poem, which feels like the collection’s centerpiece, even if it’s not meant to be. It’s the kind of line that makes you stop and reread it three or four times. The image of a mouth “dripping with stars” is undeniably cosmic, evoking the vastness of the universe, but it’s also grotesque. A mouth dripping is not a comforting image; it’s messy and violent. And that tension—between the sublime and the grotesque—is what gives the poem its power.
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You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. Please share your favorite poem from the book with us.
Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2020 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian Dan Campbell and are used with permission.
Comments (6)
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Stimulating work, Peter. I always enjoy reading you. Something different from the mass of cherry blossoms, moons, reflections in water, butterflies, grandma, mother, hospices, refugees, the homeless, diagnosis, dementia, death, ashes, and dolls-in-the-rubble (not that those subjects don’t have a place, but there are so very many similar verses about them).
My sense of haikai humour, in this context, was tickled by:
repeating ourselves
smells of old cabbage
And for humour among several reasons I also liked the more conventional:
lulling us into the next pothole nightly news
“karmaggedon a bullet returns home”
It couldn’t have been said any better.
‘Answering for itself deep silence’
This one resonates with me in a haunting way. Deep silence asks and answers. A profound expression of isolation, an impenetrable privacy.
Thanks for the book, Dan!
Thanks Pamela, if you have a recommendation for a Book of the Week feature from the THF digital library please let me know.
Hi Clysta, it is good to hear from you and thank you for the comment.
Dan, thank you for your superb curation of the THF Library…and your timing. I look forward to a deep thoughtful dive into Jastermsky’s book. Just the four haiku you’ve highlighted are enough for today.