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BROCKEN SPECTRE

2019 Alice James Books Award Editor’s Choice, Alice James Books

Shortlist Finalist for the 2021 Julie Suk Award

Set in San Francisco, Brocken Spectre examines the way the past presses up against the present. The speaker, raised in the wake of the AIDS crisis, engages with ideas of belatedness, of looking back to a past that cannot be inhabited, of the ethics of memory, and of the dangers in memorializing and romanticizing tragedy.

Features

“On Thin Ice” conversation with James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith on Breaking Form: A Poetry and Culture Podcast

“Chasm and Connection: An Interview with Jacques J. Rancourt” by Cate Lycurgus at 32 Poems

“Haunted, Beloved: A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt” by Michael Colbert over at The Rumpus

“A Conversation with Jacques J. Rancourt by Divya Mehrish” at Adroit Journal

“At Night the Humid Chorus Swells: A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt about his Newest Collection, Brocken Spectre” by Tiffany Troy at Compulsive Reader

Reviews

“‘Who would I have been back then?’ asks the speaker of this aching and astute collection of poems, many of which wrestle with the legacy and intergenerational trauma of AIDS from the point of view of someone born in the pandemic's aftermath. What does it mean to live and love in the wake of a community-rupturing crisis, when a stranger's kiss recalls ‘those men/of our fathers' generation/who'd rendezvous in parks/past dark?’”

—Michelle Hart, Oprah Daily

“[T]he final sentence fragment of Brocken Spectre is an act of self-erasure—one that relegates the speaker-poet, and by extension, Jacques Rancourt, to the past. Now part of a larger history, both figures serve as guiding spirits for those future selves who, longing for connection and continuity, will one day look back in hopes of recognizing their likenesses in the shadows of those who came before.”

—Shara Lessley, West Branch

“[W]ho are we to make sense of other people’s loving? And who is the speaker to do so? I think that is what these heart-rending, beautiful poems are most curious about: as both personal and collective traumas are examined, held up to the light, yet seen perpetually through a mist, it is not so much clarity that is manifested but wonderment: it is a wonder, though sometimes terrible, that we are what we are, that we do what we do. That we see what we see.

—Amie Whittemore, Southern Indiana Review

“Like weather, Rancourt’s poetry becomes an indelible force of nature, one which may not save lives but which we cannot forsake, which thunders and sings, lashes and lingers.”

—Reuben Gelley Newman, Diode Journal

”The poems in this collection shift position and bend the light, wrestling with what to believe of the rainbow promises of ‘never again.’”

—Erica Charis-Molling, Los Angeles Review

Advanced Praise

“Delving into the nature of memory, both cultural and emotional, the poems of Brocken Spectre are sharp, dauntless, and unflinchingly lucid. Navigating the powerful undertow of amnesia and a future that has already passed by, Jacques J. Rancourt’s lyrics alert us both to time’s layers and to the wonder of its elasticity. I admire the great tenderness these poems convey toward those who preceded them and how, in Rancourt’s hands, hauntings become inheritances worth having, even in a world on fire.”

—Mary Szybist

“Harnessing new visions from the traditions of Mark Doty and James L. White, Rancourt crystalizes the modern sublime through intelligent, complicated, and elegiac modes of inquiry through the plights and heights of the human body. Through embodied desires both difficult and triumphant, these poems recast their dreams with a deft touch of wit, poise, and an openness for transformation equal to their ambition to preserve the past and its ghosts. Bravo.”

—Ocean Vuong

“What does it mean to have survived a plague? Are we obliged to remember a disaster, or are we best called to make our own joy independent of the past? The poems in Brocken Spectre document a queer new age—one in which the AIDS crisis has abated, though the lost quietly ghost the periphery of this writer’s imagination. These moving and memorable poems speak from edges of longing and loss while they create important new narratives of meaningful connection.”

—Mark Wunderlich