“At a moment in history when simply breathing is fraught with social and political implications, to be inspired, that is, to breathe in, implies a new metaphysics. Debris, Jonathan Wells’s third poetry collection, invites us to ‘inhale the page’s fragrance and complete the scene,’ as Wells does throughout this most inspired work. And in so doing, he breathes in a rich archive of literary culture, the debris of late capitalism, the emotional debris of human relationships, and the glorious debris of lived experience. Wells makes himself vulnerable to the world to remind us that the personal is political, yes, but the political takes up residence in the body in much the way these poems do, at a cellular and most intimate level.”
—Gregory Pardlo

“The sense of timelessness one finds in Jonathan Wells’s Debris typically comes to us through translation, often from the position of exile, as if we require perspectives shot through the prism of another language to better see the lives we are in. As his speaker describes, ‘An unexpected story moves me / toward the window. Is it mine / or the one about how the pylons / crumbled and the planks fell.’This book provides a mirror to the country in which we now reside, that has for so long been unrecognizable.”
—Cate Marvin