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Book Review: Throwing the Crown by Jacob Saenz
 

Throwing the Crown
Jacob Saenz
The American Poetry Review
2018
978-0983300878
80 Pages
$15.00


Poet and editor Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero, Illinois. He earned a BA in creative writing from Columbia College in Chicago. His first collection of poetry, Throwing the Crown (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), was awarded the 2018 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.

Saenz has been an editor at Columbia Poetry Review and an associate editor at RHINO. He works as an acquisitions assistant at the Columbia College library and has read his poetry at a number of Chicago venues. A CantoMundo fellow, he has also been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship.



Review





















A Review of Jacob Saenz's Throwing the Crown

Throwing the Crown tells the story of the dirt, grime, and glitter of early boyhood in a Chicago with concrete stomped by pit bulls, gangbangers, and bachelors. A story that allows for that boyhood to morph into a manhood filled with frozen pizzas and jaded weddings. Jacob Saenz illustrates a world that is genuine and brimming with motley characters while showcasing writing that exhibits a strength in storytelling, a resonant musicality and an elegant precision. In the poem, “Demon,” we see this lyrical prowess on full blast:
We feasted on these salty & spicy
corn sticks like a pack of hyenas
cackling over a cracked open
carcass of antelope, our tongues
& fingers turning crimson

The crisp hard /c/ creates the crunch of the corn stick, but also verbal cuts, through every breath. Saenz has a grasp over the vindictive powers of sound as well as meaning within his poetry.
 
Midway through Throwing the Crown, we get the “bachelor” poems: a lonely culmination of weddings, TV shows, and household chores that create searing self-introspection. The bachelor is consistently contemplating love and the caustic longing for it. In “The Bachelor Attends a Wedding,” one’s desires are both criticized and recognized in a wedding’s sweat of love:

The garter fling forces me
to bring my nephew amongst the bachelors
& use his body to deflect the lace projectile.
A groomsman catches it & stuffs it
into his mouth like a bone. I tell my nephew
we’re all animals & he wants more ice cream.

Saenz embodies this bachelor persona that encapsulates the strange otherness in single adulthood, as you witness the virile lustiness of others and the pseudo-fantasy that surrounds the realm of passion. In “The Bachelor Watches The Bachelor,” it is the “pre-packaged romantic dates / I could never afford on my bachelor budget” that is inhabited “w/Prince Charming played by an actor / I’ve seen slaughter & behead a soldier” that spotlights this strange division. Saenz comments on the way society and media has glamorized and tainted the dating scene, and the bachelor persona shows the more conflicting reality of the situation.
 
Saenz also has a talent for bringing in unusual subjects to comment on the familiar yet critical issues of today. In “Gang of the Dead” we get a reinvention of the zombie with “Our primal instinct kicks in when we see / hordes of lumbering pale corpses / like conquistadores w/out horses.” Here we see a reinvention of the horde as a mob that is here to conquer brains rather than land. Saenz mixes the long-ago history of colonialization with the undead automaton of the zombie which is heavily used in popular media. This mirroring of consumerism and expansionism shows us how tactics have evolved.
 
Throwing the Crown illustrates the tumult in the collision of the fantastical, the hormonal, and the human. It is gang-life mixed with baseball and video games. Saenz’s unique voice propels this book and gives the poems a genuine sense of humanity through “lips / smacked together w/force & intent."


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Zachary Klozik is an undergraduate at Lewis University, studying English and Film Studies. He resides in New Lenox, Illinois and is the Marketing & Design Editor and a Poetry Editor for Jet Fuel Review. He is a Wolny Writing Residency fellow and he coordinates and hosts an Open Mic Night series in Lockport, IL. He has been published in Windows Fine Arts Magazine.

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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
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      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
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      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
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      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
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      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
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  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
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      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
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      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
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      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
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    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
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      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
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      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
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