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.

Jacob Scheier's profile page

Jacob Scheier is a poet and journalist from Toronto. His debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm won the 2008 Governor General’s award for English language poetry. Scheier’s poems have been published in literary journals and magazines across North America, including Descant, Geist and Rattle, and have been heard on CBC Radio.

“Perhaps the most difficult task with the book would be to choose a favorite image or even a favorite poem. This slim volume is packed with rich, complex, powerful poems about a wide variety of subjects. All are worthy of generous time to read and savor them, letting the chains of words roll around in one’s mind or off one’s tongue. This will be a poetry lover’s favorite.” — The Sacramento Book Review