Jack Pays a Visit - by Michael Minassian (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

These poems are centered around the character Jack Karapetian (1925-1994), who wrote under the pen name of Hakob Karapents. Born in Tabriz, Iran, Jack was a prolific Armenian-American writer who wrote almost exclusively in Armenian.

Review Quotes

Michael Minassian's fine book records the relationship between a poet and his novelist uncle. Together, they hike, pick berries, chop wood, cruise highways. The uncle reminisces and opines; the nephew carefully attends. Jack, an Armenian immigrant from Iran, is a fabulist, a guru, a memoirist who speaks of "chance meetings/with beautiful women, dead Persian poets, and philosophers," a writer who prefers "the symbol/rather than the word." He calls himself and his nephew "famous unknown persons" without whom "the whole earth, /the universe might disappear." They embody the sensibility, recollection, and art without which the cosmos would indeed be inhuman and inane. Jack haunts the poet like memory itself and is himself haunted "by the ghosts of Persian poets and forgotten deities." With its short lines and striking similes, invoking folklore and fable, past joys and pains, Jack Pays a Visit is an intimate, eloquent, and affecting testament, with a dramatic revelation in its title poem.

-Robert Wexelblatt, author of Hsi-wei Tales, and Girl Asleep and Other Poems.

Michael Minassian's chapbook Jack Pays a Visit is built around an Armenian/Persian writer who is a poet, folklorist, visionary, and uncle of the book's narrator. Uncle Jack and the narrator see and inhabit a world filled with symbols and wildly imaginative imagery. Ancestors and the recently departed are as an immediate part of the world as those still living. The departed are not ghosts, but rather companions to help the living find their way through life. The imagery in this text is lively; the narrative voice is enticing and convincing; the characters (alive and departed) are compelling and enrich the tale being told. Jack Pays a Visit is a lively, touching, richly peopled folk tale in the form of a book of poems.

-Michael L. Newell, author of Wandering and Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge.

Michael Minassian's portrait of his Uncle Jack builds up as a series of snapshots vignettes that take us rambling past the blueberry patch, across fields and into the woods. Jack prefers the symbol to the spoken word. Like any good trickster, he delights in turning his nephew's ideas upside down and shaking them out. Together they explore philosophy, poetics and history within the ordinary Zen Buddhist context of chopping wood, carrying water or driving down the interstate.

-Christine Irving, author of Return to Inanna and Sitting on the Hag Seat

Here's Uncle Jack, a character the poet Michael Minassian has both created and, clearly, has attended to very carefully. How else to explain the wisdom, the wry humor, the depth that Jack and the poems about him embody? Jack-like Minassian-is a writer, but he's grappling in his work and in his life with his displacement as a young man from his home in Persia, and from his Armenian roots. At the same time that Jack can say, "Who wouldn't want/to be an American?" he also carries with him a weight-the tales from his lost youth and from his collective past that enrich him, sadden him, and, then, make him such a fascinating companion. Michael Minassian's poems in Jack Pays a Visit are remarkable for their humanity and for their wisdom.

Alan Walowitz, author of The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems and Exactly Like Love.