The Seed Vault

Lucas Jacob’s debut collection contains something for every reader. A trio of sonnets encompassing both the eighteenth-century missions and the twentieth-century dance halls of San Antonio; a section-long poem sequence that begins and ends in a prison yard in Stalin’s gulag, and in between travels the world in the company of history’s greatest agricultural botanist; a series of playful interrogations of the rhetoric of the forty-fifth President of the United States. These poems honor the need to find the words for experiences, thoughts, and feelings that exist at, or just beyond, the edge of language.