Photo: Toby Mesler
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. His newest book, Memphis Movie Two, a novel, is from Whiskey Tit. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.
i might look like robert frost but i feel just like jesse james – poetry
i might look like robert frost but i feel just like jesse james is a late-life collection of poems. This newest assemblage grapples with aging, dying, parenting, loving, poor health, and the heart's resiliency. There’s a lot of looking back. There’s an equal amount of looking at what is in front of the author.
Early Praise for I Might Look Like Robert Frost but I Feel Just Like Jesse James
“Corey Mesler’s I Might Look Like Robert Frost but I Feel Just Like Jesse James is a book of late songs, bad dreams, old loves, dying parents, Memphis ghosts, jokes that know they are standing near a grave, and poems that keep trying to outrun their own tenderness. Mesler writes as if poetry were both confession and misdemeanor. They return us to the stubborn little flame of wanting to go on. Mesler may look like Robert Frost and feel like Jesse James, but what he really sounds like is Corey Mesler: comic, haunted, generous, and beautifully unguarded.”
—Mark Yakich, author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross
“Though he is ‘present at the unravelling,’ Mesler attends to this moment in his life and in ours with unguarded desire; with losses mounting and grief arriving in waves, the poet in his weathered and unsentimental voice continues to give praise. There are poems here that enact some of the most complicated turns and twists of cruelty and tenderness, of aspiration and resignation. The elegy ‘My Mother is Dying’ is just one exquisite example, taking us by the hand along a very tortuous path to something like forgiveness but really, more like a moment of the kind of grace, born of perspective, that we all need. Another short poem ‘Death is a needle’ is gnomic, with a kind of wink in it, as if to say ‘think about it.’ And we do, we do. I Might LookLike Robert Frost but I Feel Just Like Jesse James is a gift to be received with gratitude.”
—Richard Hoffman, author of Each Child a Disappearance
"I Might Look Like Robert Frost but I Feel Just Like Jesse James is an extraordinary collection of new poems. Chock-full of exquisite imagery and stunning insight. Beautiful and incredibly moving. Astonishing. Highly recommended."
—Ellyn Maybe, author of Walking Barefoot in Glass Blowers Museum
"These plainspoken (yet in the same breath deeply strange) poems circle around life’s deepest mysteries—death, love, loneliness, joy. Mesler is a poet of small moments and crystalline memories, with an eye for life’s absurdities that feels big-hearted."
—Nick Flynn, author of Low