Jacob Strautmann

Writer

I was born and raised in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, but I’ve spent most of my life in Greater Boston. My debut book of poems The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business was published in 2020, and New Vrindaban arrived in 2024. While the earlier poems return to my Northern Appalachian roots, the second book is a musical review of grief, guilt, and family.

I’m working on a collection of poems inspired by the series of paintings (tentatively titled “Abstractions”) of Frankfurt-based artist Eva Strautmann. A couple of these poems show up in New Vrindaban, and the painting featured on the front cover of the book is Eva’s. This third manuscript of poems is tentatively titled Golden Horses. The first three of these poems (with translations by Kassi Burnett) are published in literaturblatt.ch.

New Vrindaban

New Vrindaban lives in the disputed territory between the past and present. An electrifying collision of uniquely Appalachian cultural forces, the formal division of poems into “Side One” and “Side Two” pay homage to the concept albums of 1970s garage rock, while the book’s title alludes to the intentional Hare Krishna community in West Virginia founded in the same era.Jacob Strautmann’s latest collection builds an extraordinary temple on the compromised ground — it houses the compressed narratives of varied characters, monumentalizes the beautiful illusions of failed ideas, and remembers the irretrievable innocent love of youth. The music of New Vrindaban is both a ballad of survivor’s guilt and the raucous soundtrack of a record party among friends. It is the “black swift-moving waters,” “the bright clouds unmoored in the wind.”

The Land of the Dead Is Open For Business

The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business is an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann’s home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream.Throughout the book, voices rise up from the page to describe a landscape eroded and plundered by runaway capitalism—its mountain tops leveled by the extractive industries, its waters polluted by runoff from mines—and the fallout from that waste. Those who remain are consigned to life in a ravaged land denuded of nature where birds die and “Sheep/birth limp two-headed things and some / that speak like men if they speak at all.”

Poems

Literaturblatt, "Constituents," "Marriage Photo," "Past Self," 2025Verdant Journal, “Eclogue,” 2024Sixth Finch, “Virgilian,” 2024Nixes Mate, “The End of the Empire Thinks about the Beginning,” 2023Anacapa Review, “The Garden,” 2023On the Seawall, “The Libyan Poet Recites in Brighton, Massachusetts Before He Is Prepped for Surgery,” 2023Northern Appalachia Review, “Limestone Cemetery (Richard’s Second Story),” “Under the Velvet Elvis,” 2023The ArtsFuse, “Epimetheus in the Fall of the Year,” 2023Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, “Transiting Planet,”“New Hominoid Chats with Reporters,” 2023Analog Science Fiction and Fact, “Ode to Mulgrew,” 2023SOFTBLOW, “What is Now Proved,” “The Scalding Bath,” “Sean’s Song,” “The Achievement,” 2022Sequestrum, “Kessler Syndrome (Terra View E2112),” “Light Job (Interstellar View X3444),” “Patternicities (Lunar View J2857),” “The Schiaparelli Stage,” 2022Twelve Mile Review, “Blue Bones, Catch Hold,” 2022Twelve Mile Review, “The Gates of Life,” 2022Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, “Nostos,” 2021Northern Appalachian Review, “Moundsville Trains,” “The Owls of Allendale,” “Mildred’s Flight”, 2021Northern Appalachian Review, “The Ohio Again Nightbird of Memory,” 2020Artsake (MCC), “For as Long as It Lasts (and It will Last If Money Can Be Made),” 2020The Drum, “Report, Upper Big Branch,” 2020Salamander, “Buffalo Creek,” 2019Blackbird, “I Dream I Meet Irene McKinney at the Ruined House of the Photographer” and “School Bus Brocade,” 2019

Salamander Magazine, “Buffalo Creek,” 2019Jessie Wilson Gallery showing of art book, “Report, Upper Big Branch,” 2019Southern Humanities Review, “Even Windrows” and “She Longed to be a Bird, White Tail, Stray Dog,” 2019Agni Magazine, “Goatface,” 2018Appalachian Heritage, "The Boy and the Rafter," "The Leap" and "Monongahela, Allegheny Coal Field…," 2018Jam Tarts Magazine, “Fork Ridge Right-of-Way,” 2017Forklift, Ohio, “Killing Frost,” 2017Unsplendid, “Wheeling Baptism” and “Grapevine Ridge Proposals,” and letter to editor regarding revision featured, 2017The Harlequin, “Par Avion” and “What’s Left” and “Advice for A Mountain Laureate,” 2016Quiddity International, “Five String” (winner of the Quiddity Editor’s Prize for Poetry) and “Honey Locust,” 2015Jam Tarts Magazine, “South Garden,” 2015Solstice, “The Land of the Dead is Open for Business,” 2014SpoKe Magazine, “Apis Calf, Ashfield,” 2013Poetry Northeast, “Overburden,” 2013Salamander Magazine, “Mercy Prayer” and “Benwood Mine and Queen Anne’s Lace,” 2012The Boston Globe, “The Poet Arrives at the Former Site of the John Brown Trailer Park,” 2011The Center, “Sycamore Song” and “My Father’s Father’s Cadillac,” 2006Appalachian Journal, “Poem for You,” 2006Agni Magazine Online, “Jill Returns to Cameron,” 2003Perihelion Online, “M’s Vortex” and “Late Spring,” 2002

Contact

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