Stupid Hope

Jason Shinder’s last poems are his moving testimonies to poetry, love, and friendship. With power, clarity, and disarming humor, the poems confront grief and mortality with a humility and fortitude that only comes “with hope, stupid hope.” Stupid Hope is Shinder’s wry, penetrating, and wise farewell.

“Jason Shinder is a poet of the holy wound. He always has written of ’the whacked and wounded self’—and also, you might say, of the ‘whacky and wounded self’. At times he is rather like a Saint Sebastian, who, body bristling with arrows and very little clothing, does stand-up comedy. In these late poems, it is the raw, soulful nakedness that often astonishes. He testifies, with a distressed and distressing honesty, to his personal case of the human condition. ‘If there is no cure,’ he says, ‘I still want to correct a few things.’ In Stupid Hope, this true poet comes into his poetic maturity, with tones and angularities like no one else's. How moving it is to be with him as he breaks the code of being broken. What he says of the mother in the poem ‘The Change,’ we would say of him: ‘Thank you, mother. You let me see you unprotected, / full of doubt, miserable. So I could know you were still alive, / so I could know what loving someone looked like.’”