Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse

Little Boy Blue is a lyrically-charged dramatic monologue in the voice of a mother to her absent son. In twenty-three movements, the speaker reveals the facts, feelings, textures, perspectives and sensations that inform this most personal and intense relationship, one that survives betrayal, abandonment, neglect, mental illness and other calamities of contemporary American life. Occupying the ground between poetry and prose, and with an ever-gathering momentum and passionate intensity, Jacobik examines motherhood, sanity, and heartbreakingly tender, resilient love.

Gray Jacobik is a widely anthologized poet; The Double Task was selected by James Tate for the Juniper Prize; The Surface of Last Scattering received the X. J. Kennedy Prize; Brave Disguises, the AWP Poetry Series Award.  In 2016The Banquet: New & Selected Poems received the William Meredith Award in Poetry.  She’s been awarded The Yeats Prize, the Emily Dickinson Award and the Third Coast Poetry Prize. Jacobik is a painter as well as a poet and several CKP covers have featured her art. She has released two poetry collection with CavanKerry Press –Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse (2011) and Eleanor (2020). http://www.grayjacobik.com/

2 (an excerpt)

Not quite two years since you sat in your white truck

In my driveway, your two toast-brown dogs
in the seat beside you, eager to go, & you
telling me your girlfriend is a good person,
& you love her, news which gladdens me

though you won’t believe that, for how seldom
have you loved anyone? Way back behind
the heavy green dazzle of late September light,
somewhere in the sadness I felt at your leaving,

I knew I’d never see you again, you & the truck
& the dogs & the woman, who is not here
but who’s said you cannot ever speak to me
again, for she won some game of her design,

you the prize, me the loser, some struggle she sees
between good, aligned with her, evil, aligned
with me, & you, there, compliant, ready
to go; although I see you are sick with the pain

of it, your face wincing before you harden yourself
once more, your head bowed as if you’d been
sentenced. I hear again, that awkward, tuning-fork
hum of the silence that’s always been between us.

In Little Boy Blue, Gray Jacobik’s amazing ability to traverse from the innermost part of individual experience to the absurdity and cruelty of the social world is given full compass. I love this poem. I love how rich it is, going back and forth in time, and how true it feels; how the story of this particular mother and son deepens as it unfolds, though from the beginning it is very deep. Clear, complicated without seeming so, with long winding sentences that one follows absolutely, the turn of the line always right, the tension between line and sentence integral: Jacobik’s language keeps us with her, taking us exactly—and masterfully—where she wants us to go. Hers is a rare gift.
— Carol Moldaw

Gray Jacobik dares to aim at integration, at re-membering. By the time Little Boy Blue accrues so artfully to its final lines (breaking like waves on the shore) it is more gratifying than a dozen sequences or series. The poem enacts the partly willed, partly allowed restor(y)ing of the past, beyond the false narrative of guilt and redemption.
— Richard Hoffman

I’m not given to reading poetry books straight through, but I did sit down and read Little Boy Blue that way. I started and didn’t stop until I’d finished an hour and a half later. It’s terrific!!!!!!! A blockbuster—in its honesty, first of all; in the quality of the life and emotions it conveys; in the heartbreak, in the great struggle of the spirit to survive, and finally, to triumph. It’s a hell of a life with a story to match, and Jacobik does it great justice.
— Robert Dana

February 2011
pp 86
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-22-8
LaurelBooks