Overwinter

by Pataky, Jeremy

A debut collection from an exciting new voice in Alaska poetry, Overwinter reconciles the natural quiet of wilderness with the clamor of built environments. Pataky’s migration between Anchorage and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park inspires these poems that connect urban to rural. This duality permeates Overwinter. Moments are at turns fevered or serene. The familial and romantic are measured against the wildness of the far north. Empty spaces bring both solace and loneliness in full. Past loves haunt the present, surviving in the spaces sculpted by language.

Emerson suggests that ‘genius is the activity that repairs the decay of things.’ Such genius is at work in Pataky’s debut, Overwinter. . . . A book that makes of the heart’s affections a myriad world, where presence and absence intertwine, and the poet is no more than faithful recorder of difficulty and wonder.

—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of A Whaler’s Dictionary

In a word, Overwinter is about life. Maybe not everyone's life in entirety, but aspects—small details—are related through the eons-long relationship between man and nature. . . . There is much of this introspection and observation, and while it deals with concerns of Alaskan life there is also something for a broader readership in these poems. There's something for anyone that is willing to still their mind, listen and look.

—Anchorage Press

Pataky’s debut poetry collection, examines the speaker’s isolation and solace in the vast, untamed nature of the Alaskan wilderness. Throughout the collection, the speaker spends his time between a developed city, with its electricity and human companionship, and the natural Alaskan landscape filled with its braided streams, unpredictable wildlife, and endless illusions of light and depth.

—NewPages.com

Jeremy Pataky earned an MFA from the University of Montana, where he was awarded a Poetry Fellowship and a Bertha Morton Scholarship. He lives in Anchorage and McCarthy, Alaska, and is a founding board member of 49 Writers, a literary nonprofit. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cirque, Colorado Review, Ice Floe, The Southeast Review, and many others.