Places of Permanent Shade

Poetry May 2022 ISBN 978-1-936628-92-6 90 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

"In Places of Permanent Shade, J. Kates tackles the big themes along with some smaller ones, but whether he is writing about chopping wood or the end of the world, he brings to his poetry a restless intelligence, subtle humour and a keen sense of observation, both of the inner and the outer life. His tone and use of imagery are remarkable and varied, the voice both colloquial and elegant. And often, lurking just around the corner, is a sharp wit that will jump out and bite you on the arse before you know it."—Peter Robinson, author of Not Dark Yet

humor

From the Book

English as a Foreign Language

The teacher writes war.
One pupil, finding it hard
to say the letter "r,"
accidentally asks, why?
One of the orphans starts to cry.
This, the teacher thinks, is more
than I bargained for.

Forging a new language
is the first campaign.
Those who have learned
catch as catch can,
caught at a disadvantage,
need to have
the simplest things explained.

Men are no longer men,
women no longer women.
Children over here remain
children, while others, made
into collateral damage,
grub through rubble
or shiver in the dark, afraid.

The teacher writes, war.
A pupil well on her way
(but not yet there)
accidentally asks, where?
The orphans all keep quiet.
This, the teacher thinks,
is more like it.

What Others Say

Kates's poems in Places of Permanent Shade are full of colors and visions of the world, both hauntingly realistic and charmingly skewed. He blends themes of light and darkness in ways that affect both the senses and the soul.

— Ralph Eubanks , author of A Place Like Mississippi

In Places of Permanent Shade, J. Kates tackles the big themes along with some smaller ones, but whether he is writing about chopping wood or the end of the world, he brings to his poetry a restless intelligence, subtle humour and a keen sense of observation, both of the inner and the outer life. His tone and use of imagery are remarkable and varied, the voice both colloquial and elegant. And often, lurking just around the corner, is a sharp wit that will jump out and bite you on the arse before you know it.

— Peter Robinson , author of Not Dark Yet

On The Briar Patch: None of the poems in the volume is less than accomplished. Those that are more, that have everything attached and don't turn polite about what has been scratched, make the leap from ah to oh.

— Marcia Karp , Artsfuse

Kates brings an almost fierce attention to what matters in art and life, and never turns away from the hard truths … yet everywhere in these poems there is abundant love and laughter.

— Marie Harris

About the Author

J. Kates

J. Kates, an award-winning literary translator and the co-director of Zephyr Press, has been granted three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has had published three chapbooks of his own poems (two of which are folded into Places of Permanent Shade) and one previous collection of poems, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books). He is also the translator of a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, has edited two anthologies of translations, and collaborated with Stephen A. Sadow on a half dozen books of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish poetry in translation.