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Praise for The Novice Angler

One cannot help but feel moved by the combination of dark wit, honesty, & insights present in J.M. Green’s The Novice Angler. Personal, poignant, sometimes despairing, other times surreal, his poems span topics as varied as racism, erectile dysfunction, politics, & family (and sometimes several of these topics at once), while moving gracefully from formal to free verse & back again. J.M. Green is clearly a unique and exciting new voice for American poetry.

— Nin Andrews, author of Miss August and Why God Is a Woman

As a truly complete angler, J.M. Green uses barbed hooks, so even his evocative memory pieces (such as “1976” and “Sherwood Park Community Club”) catch us and sting as we go for the sensory bait. He’s also a poet who looks for unexpected angles, like an expressionist movie director. These poems are richly detailed and rewardingly disturbing, a pleasure to be caught by.

— John Philip Drury, author of Sea Level Rising and Creating Poetry

On the poem “1976”

This one sneaks up on you, starting as what seems like a poem of nostalgic memory, and growing by degrees into a grim gaze, absolutely unblinking, at evil in the guise of family lore and love. It chills you to the bone.

— Diana Hume George, co-director of The Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and Chautauqua Journal contributing editor

J.M. Green establishes a voice most poets take years to achieve, and then only if they are honest and brave enough to try. Green is both. There is such abundance here! The poems are steadfast in facing the past—a grandfather’s racism, sibling comedies, a stepfather’s love, the old barbershop, and the “wisdom” passed down from uncles. But they are equally funny and kind, with formal interludes (haiku stanzas; a sonnet that might be one of the sweetest ever written by a father to his daughter; wild sestinas about witches and the CIA and Kim Jong-il) and a generosity and sense of humor that always expands, never contracts into a whine. I’ve tried to think of the perspective closest to Green’s in my experience and I landed on J. F. Powers. Like Powers, this poet is no naif in his observations. This is not American fresh-faced optimism cleverly counterpointed against its darker edge. These poems are much funnier than that. They deliver poetry’s real pleasures, set in the wry music of our times.

— James Cummins, author of Still Some Cake and The Whole Truth

2018 Ohioana Library Poetry Book Award Nominee