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Online published works
Linden Avenue
Carbon Culture Review
Cathexis Northwest Press
Bio
Jacob Minasian received his MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California, where he was the 2016 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize winner. He is the author of the forthcoming novella The Places Between (2024), the full-length collection Vestiges (2023), and the chapbook American Lit (2020), and his work has appeared in publications including
Poets.org, Museum of Americana, RipRap Literary Journal, Lucky Jefferson, CP Quarterly, Windows Facing Windows Review, Red Ogre Review, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California by Scarlett Tanager Books, among others. Originally from California, he currently lives with his wife and daughter in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Praise for
American
Lit
I can’t think of a recent book of poems that has come from the midwest that feels more necessary to me than Jacob Minasian‘s American Lit. These poems have a quiet, bold, determined, confident intelligence, and a startling directness. They are the record of a person trying to make sense of the coasts where he has lived and traveled, and of his current home, the land of the Meijer superstore, of pastures and freeways and Ohio’s “metal wasteland … like some brutal aftermath.” After reading American Lit, I felt like I understood, or perhaps more important, had the opportunity to feel, at least part of the landscape and mood and politically charged and socially ambiguous and ambivalent spirit of the middle of the country. I am immensely grateful for this book, and for this essential new voice in American poetry.
Matthew Zapruder,
Author of Why Poetry and
Father's Day
Praise for Vestiges
​
A book of seasons and a sense of an age—a soldier turned into stone, a hawk with trash in its talons, a long-absent father’s visitation—are we in Ohio, or California, or ancient Greece? Holding up the mirror of Greek myth to the current American moment, Minasian considers the patterns that entrain or sustain us. Vestiges‘ sharp, observant poems explore the old (new) story of resistance and movement, change and homecoming, “the invisible channels skating between realities."
Mary Cisper, Author of Dark Tussock Moth
The poems in Jacob Minasian‘s American Lit attentively survey our current iteration of absurdity and desperation, when “all the good monsters have failed us” or continue to fail us, our environment, and our own common interests. And so we continue, underpaid, “trying to avoid/ the news, because /things are happening.” Minasian’s poems are real, rooted in ordinary experience, with everything that entails—they are angry, sad, and beautiful, and contain a resilience and belief that, amongst it all, “Periodically things/ are pierced by art.”
Brett Fletcher Lauer,
Author of A Hotel in Belgium
Jacob Minasian‘s ambitious book, Vestiges, is an incredibly engaging first full-length poetry collection written for our dystopian times. Set in the eight months ending in the 2020 impeachment hearings, the collection explores both the personal as well as the big issues including climate change, overly divisive politics, and our crass modern materialism. Using an inventive structure, each section contains close observations constructed carefully with intriguing wordplay. Minasian’s interest in re-imagining the classics, whether Greek mythology or poetic forms like the haiku sequence and the crown of sonnets, is integral to his poetic vision. A vision that sees the troubled world as it is, borrows from a mythical past, and generates a work which somehow provides hope for the future.
