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Distributed for Carnegie Mellon University Press

Just About Anything

New and Selected Poems

A probing collection of new and selected poetry from Jonathan Aaron.

A poem uses words to try to get at what can't be put into words. The best poems remain just out of reach; something in or about them remains mysterious. A poem itself is an inquiry or a search, that is never finished, never fulfilled. As Wislawa Szymborska said, “Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous ‘I don't know.’”

128 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 | © 2025

Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series

Poetry


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Reviews

"Jonathan Aaron is the master of the noir fable. Ranging from the darkly humorous to the elegiac, the poems in Just About Anything both show and recount how the ordinary can slip at any moment into the unsteady worlds of legend and dream: A dog advises her master to read Solzhenitsyn; a landlady's husband turns into a giant snake; a man time-travels to tell Bach about the future. Aaron's haunting collection leads us to places where we experience ourselves––suddenly and unpredictably––'more truly and more strange.'”

Rosanna Warren

"In Just About Anything, Jonathan Aaron invites us into a world unlike any other––a place of dark wonders and strange delights, where even the sunniest landscapes can hold mystery and muted menace. In one poem Nikolai Gogol ruins a stew, in another the Invisible Man riffles the pages of a book, in yet another a man bows to the wisdom of a magic horse. Such moments seem natural in the alternate realities these poems explore. And beyond such uneasy fun, a series of powerful love poems reveals the depth of feeling that underlies the inventiveness of this superb collection."

John Skoyles

“'What’s it like coming back to life and discovering / you’re fluent in a dead language?' the narrator wonders in this book so brilliantly alive to what it’s saying that just like that we’re ready for Just About Anything. Imagine poems as uncanny as they are disenchanted, capable of great metaphysical and historical reach yet never raising their voice or venturing too far from the plainest words in the language, and hardly a single line that isn’t in the service of exacting finer gradations of feeling: these are just some of the four decades worth of lyric felicities registered in Jonathan Aaron’s work. What Adam Zagajewski described as poetry that mediates the stringent necessities of 'the shabby and the sublime' fits his temperament to a T."

George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos

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