In Letter from Brooklyn, Jacob Scheier examines love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of his new poems is the notion that we understand who we are by where we have been. Here, a confessional voice digs deep into a radical Jewish heritage rooted in New York City. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical.
Whether eating in a knish restaurant on the Lower East Side or falling in and then out of love with the Brooklyn Bridge, being startled while biking down a prairie road or searching for a European village wiped clear off the map, with depth and originality Scheier confronts the question of where home is and what it means amid private and public loss.