Now, a decade after Jackson wrote Metropolis, and five years after I read it, Jackson has released Origin Story, where he seeks to explore many of the questions that Metropolis overlooked.įramed around a series of poems crafted as erasures of conversations Jackson recorded with his mother, Origin Story focuses on the clash of cultures within his family, from his Korean grandmother, to his mixed-race mother, to his own childhood growing up in the primarily white midwest.
Looking back on the book, and myself, there is certainly an immaturity, not solely because of the subject matter, but in the voice of the speaker attempting to bury the questions surrounding the reality of his language and experience within the fictional landscape. The book is an exploration of Jackson’s midwestern childhood and the fundamental role the tales of heroes like the Flash and Superman played in it. I read Gary Jackson’s first book, Missing You Metropolis, when I was twenty-one, still getting my feet under me as an adult and poet, and was awed at the idea that you could mix poetry and pop culture at all, let alone with actual poetic skill.
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