Poetry Reading with UNA professor Jason McCall At FLPL

The hard truth of Jason McCall’s Two-Face God is this: there is no space in this world without duality, without the glossy surface and the hidden darkness, that always pushes through and must be reckoned with. From love, to history, to memory, to race, these poems probe this duality.

Author Bryan Dietrich says of the collection:

“Janus from the ruins of Rome, Wally West from the pages of DC comics, Count Fenring from the shifting sands of Dune… Again and again in Jason McCall’s new book, we are confronted with the masked and doubled voices of outsiders, haunted and hungry souls who feel like fakers in their own skin, perhaps traitors, perhaps unsung heroes who no one could possibly believe in. From the linoleum halls of his Montgomery high school to the marble halls of Vahalla and Justice, Jason McCall’s various voices serve as aegis between a real boy who is gifted with great insight and the society/self that cannot fully embrace the exceptional. This book, a book about exclusion and acceptance, explores the experience of otherness from the perspective of the hero who, himself, is perhaps just as critical as the crowds that jeer when the speedster who wasn’t supposed to win actually crosses the finish line first. Here we find a voice ‘searching for one more life,’ for a world where ‘skin doesn’t matter,’ for a universe where God will just ‘get out of the way,’ for a life where the underdog who understands both past and future, both Telemachus and Trayvon Martin, Armageddon and Alabama, Woodley Park and Wally West cannot, will not, become the ultimate enemy.”

For more information, call 256-764-6564, ext. 128.