WITNESS, by jacob wolos

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features. This collection is a meditation, an imperfect record-keeping of the passing of a year, from Autumn 2020 to Summer 2021. Those days, the world was as quiet and as loud as it has ever been: dreams and relationships grew permeable, and loneliness itself became a traveling companion. This collection is a photograph, a smudge of moment overexposed. In twelve scenes, it entangles solemn moments of reality with jubilant moments of surreality, mournful recollections of the past, and ecstatic prayers toward our deserved collective future. jacob wolos (he/they) is a queer and Jewish poet and scholar, a fiercely interdisciplinary artist-activist, and a zealous community organizer and educator. Their writing is most intimately concerned with things such as the distortion of memory, migration, vibrant materialism, and the discovery of kinship, liberation, love, and joy in the swirling disorientation of existence. His writing, thinking, and activism is inspired by diasporic Yiddish modernist internationalist poets of the early 20th century in conversation with contemporary Palestinian poets, Kashmiri poets, queer poets, and all those who use language as a reclamation. Among the many ancestors of revolution that haunt wolos’s every action, word, and movement, Ram Dass is always nearby, guiding with the quote, “we are all just walking each other home.”