It's Not Magic

“It’s Not Magic is, in fact, a magical experience, a book that dazzles with its linguistic sleight of hand, blurs the poetic line between illusion and reality, and made me disappear into another dimension of language where honesty is as beautiful as it is brutal.”
—Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Could a sentence be a life, or, at least, a version of one? A thing we read this way and that way, unpinnable? Everywhere here is the discipline of trying—to sense, read, be, get free. I mean: this book is a series of astonishments. And the way it is made of Sands’s everything—dreams, once-secrets, goodbyes, golds, and embarrassments—makes me know that any life is also a book of poems. Difficult, impossible, gleaming. What brilliant and generous work this is.”
—Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia

“Opening with a question, Jon Sands invites us into a personal journey that is at once comic, deadly serious, beautifully meditative, and completely within the praxis of being human. Sands’s magic lies not in the sleight of hand or the sudden disappearance of objects; it is more about walking backwards, the lifesaving text, and a life that refuses to be lived in silence. It’s Not Magic is the truth at rapid speed and a bounty of innovation.”
—Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch

“Jon Sands is the raconteur we’ve been waiting for. Savoring these poems, it’s hard to believe that Jon strides the same world we do—these inventive stanzas resurrect, reconstruct, rejigger and redefine, all with that enviable Sands signature. (There’s nothing like this.) (Wow.)”
—Patricia Smith, Incendiary Art