School for Runaways - by Jonah (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Often funny, sometimes harrowing, each prose poem in the debut chapbook from Erik(a) Jonah captures a moment in the daily life of a school for runaways and homeless youth. Jonah's poems introduce a cast of students and a teacher (once a troubled youth themself) seeking glimmers of human connection amidst the housing crisis, the Trump presidency, and the often harsh realities of survival. We are invited inside scenes at once prosaic and intensely poignant, as a teacher makes smoothies for breakfast and collects students' weapons, a student eats a chicken sandwich while his sister lights his sleeping bag on fire, a teacher reviews fractions with a youth who sells fentanyl, a non-binary student falls in love and searches for direction, and a young mother's baby mashes banana into the carpet.

Throughout are surprises and beauty, from pet rats named after jazz musicians to youth handing out gifts on the same corner where they used to panhandle. At once playful and humanizing, School for Runaways is a rare confluence of literary poetics and stories from the unhoused community.

Review Quotes

In Erik(a) Jonah's School for Runaways life teems under enormous pressure. From an institution not quite the same as other institutions, people we sometimes call students dream in this kaleidoscopically moving set of prose poems. Mitosis is not a fact but the dream to "separate and grow;" solving for X moves you out of the school. There are weapons but violence comes more subtly. I'm using "you" because the poems let us in; they form intimacy through simple presence. They've started it already. We're here, teaching each other things we know simply because that's what we know: "To write, / they say, you have to open something up." --S. Brook Corfman, author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites

School for Runaways is a heart-wrenching, funny, and nimble juggernaut of a chapbook! Erik(a) Jonah demonstrates what prose poems can do--a box, like school--in their expansiveness and versatility. They veer, dodge, dialogue, calculate, sass. Contained in them are as much presence as things tamped down. They make a home, variable and figurative, shaped as a heart. --Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago

In Erik(a) Jonah's transcendent chapbook School for Runaways, we find that even hunger, loneliness, poverty, abandonment, and pain can be sites for the numinous. "To write," the author's students proclaim, "you have to open something up," and nothing could be more open to the elements than these frankly magical little lyric chunks which follow the first rule of any great prose poem, which is to leap and leap hard. These poems make their moves like children dashing between puddles--and then aiming for the largest, splashiest one. "I wonder if the world needs me," remarks the speaker, and I can assure you that we do. If you want to feel human again--to move beyond compassion and empathy and into the deep recognition of self within other--then read these poems. Let them remind you of the dailiness of pain, of what it can crack open when we allow ourselves to be teacher, peer, and magician to each other, meeting each person and each moment like "two nebulas [which] can collide and not touch, just go through each other again and again." --Keetje Kuipers, editor, Poetry Northwest

About the Author

Erik(a) Jonah has work published in The Adroit Journal, Foglifter, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A non-binary teacher, Erika was a finalist for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. They were recently awarded a residency at The Mineral School in Washington, as well as being nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the journal Cave Wall. MFA from the University of Oregon. Erik has taught in the Bronx, in Ohio, and at a school for runaway and homeless youth in Eugene, Oregon.