PRAISE FOR SEARCHING FOR SMOKE RINGS

Jonce’s Searching for Smoke Rings is an anti-ode to the beauty of becoming under capital. Writing from within those hollow spaces where we can begin to taste the “ripeness / and the living thing / that we are.” A gathering up of self-debris in sense-perception. Sound is physical, is viscous. Is endolymph on the sidewalk. “my ear fluid, a glue / holding my fragmented / history together.” Using sound to map the self in negative. Jonce is a non-binary Niedecker. The persistence of becoming under forces who would prefer the decomposition of any lyric. Hope is the thing in stolen nail polish. Is.

“I am the only one who can / keep myself going.”

— Mathilda Cullen, author of Trace Happenings and creator of Woe Eroa

"Reaching for states of dissipation, narrowing fluidity against absence, circling the round-about until you find your exit. Searching for Smoke Rings is no story of triumph. Have you ever tried to box a ring of smoke? It is a long stare into the center of a ring just before it spreads into the air. The voice of the poems and its cast of characters, friends and nameless neighbors, keep you company in the meantime, form gaps in the haze. The resolve of the work does not come in neat conclusion. It is the resolve of the speaker to turn to face, away from the hollow of decorated breath, and toward determination to exist, in recognition that the permission for this will never come."

—Anna McColgan, activist and author of I Want You To Live