Jason Emde's poems in little bit die are intimate and haunted recollections of travel and freedom, of friendship and loss, of leaving and getting home. Careening from small-town Canada to Zimbabwe to Mexico to Poland to Tiananmen Square to Gifu, Japan, Emde traces how the heart moves through its spheres of grief and the ways it endures "in the middle of the noise."
"It's a fantastic book; it broke my heart and made me laugh at the same time. Does it get any better than that?"
-Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies
"In heady intimate anaphoras that recall Allen Ginsberg and ecstatic catalogues of rich plurality and particularity reminiscent of Walt Whitman, Jason Emde's little bit die traces a life bisected between Vernon, Canada and Gifu, Japan. These poems lead us through streets layered with the repeated footsteps of growing children, hotels haunted by a single night's drunken laughter, houses that remain identical outside but where "modern-sleek" updates replace the "indescribable nameless junk" that lives on in memory. At its heart, this book is an elegy for a friendship between "two non-macho guys / who loved each other for 30 years" and a testament to what it means to lose a friend who holds so much shared past. Emde plumbs the paradoxes of our inner and outer geographies. little bit die leaves us with a curious and wonderous sense that we are-that every person is, every place is-"just as vast / inside as out." These digressive, voice-driven, strange, and funny poems remind us how our daily errands, chores, and acts of care touch on the deepest mysteries of being. Like Frank O'Hara, Jason Emde's infectious voice and astonished attention to the intimate ordinary will follow you long after you set down this book."
-Bronwen Tate, author of The Silk the Moths Ignore
"Jason's incredible. Such energy and vision"
-John Lent, author of A Matins Flywheel
Jason Emde is a teacher, writer, undefeated amateur boxer, Prince enthusiast, creator and host of the Writers Read Their Early Sh*t podcast, and the author of My Hand's Tired & My Heart Aches. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and his work has appeared in Real Travel, The Malahat Review, Soliloquies Anthology, The Watershed Review, and numerous other publications.