Minesweeper

Minesweeper is not only poetry, but an exceptional piece of art of extraordinary caliber. Minesweeper sweeps us off our feet with its state-of-the-art bilingual-hyphenated, prepotent field of precocity and its intense algorithmic / microchipic tenderness / terseness / ingemination. It's so supremely well-balanced, so playful, so brilliant. While breaking our hearts with piquant line breaks, Jed Munson relentlessly surprises us with his accelerated gravity of recombineable, scrabblic, vulnerable inventions and cataclysmic candidness. It is a chapbook that defies our limitations and flourishes with dynamic, energetic wit. -VI KHI NAO

"Do not forget," Wittgenstein once cautioned, "that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." One would never forget such a thing when reading Jed Munson's ludic lucubrations, which are as razor-sharp as they are full of risk and rambunctiousness. Engaging with Munson's Minesweeper is to get swept up in a poetics of polyglot playfulness. When the odds are stacked against us, it is heartening to know that there is a fine new player in town. Game on. -MICHAEL LEONG

Jed Munson's poems in Minesweeper get the far out present, the present present, the remembered present, & the shadow present, at minimum, together freaking the scene and sensed. They make rhythm and interruption be bound to one another as a multi-lingual record of consciousness, and this happens across a range of tones, textures, and forms in space constantly moving. I dig their angry and amused pleasure in handling and unhandling the steady intermittence of listening. -ANSELM BERRIGAN

[Winner of the 2022 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest]