Jonce Marshall Palmer

Poet & Author

About

Jonce is a poet, musician, and librarian living in the Denver, Colorado. They are the author of two chapbooks, Tangram (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Searching for Smoke Rings (Ghost City Press, 2020).Their poems can be found in Paintbucket, Kanstellation, SPORAZINE, Pedestal Magazine, Plainsongs, Prolit Magazine, Protean Magazine, Beestung, Blue Marble Review, Harpy Hybrid Review, and many more.Their blog can be found at redmuse.xyz or on Tumblr at @redmuse.An extensive amount of album reviews, music news, and more can be found at Everything Is Noise.

Books

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A tangram is often defined as something like “a puzzle cut into seven pieces that can be formed into various shapes”. It comes from the Chinese invention qīqiǎobǎn that became popular in Europe in the 18th century. You probably played with them as a child and perhaps didn’t know what it was called.For Jonce Marshall Palmer, this is what poetry means—being able to play with the page, the contradictions of structure breathe life into the poem. Theirs is a poetics of movement, and their work expands, sways, falls, and yes, flies off the page. The legibility of each poem in Tangram is found just as much as its form as in its content. In this collection, every poem is a different creature with it’s own unique story of survival.“In Tangram, Jonce Marshall Palmer addresses the personal and the public—from the loss of a grandparent to a fascist in the McDonald’s drive-thru and Victory Day in Moscow. These poems try to make sense of the pieces of identity strewn about like the pieces of a tangram, culminating in a shape only this poet can make. This chapbook offers up answers in a fresh voice—not giving the reader something easy but something true.”—William Fargason, author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara

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A search for a queerness as ephemeral and fleeting as smoke, the poems in this brief collection rise in determination and defiance.Jonce’s Searching for Smoke Rings is an anti-ode to the beauty of becoming under capital. Writing from within those hollow spaces where we can begin to taste the “ripeness / and the living thing / that we are.” A gathering up of self-debris in sense-perception. Sound is physical, is viscous. Is endolymph on the sidewalk. “my ear fluid, a glue / holding my fragmented / history together.” Using sound to map the self in negative. Jonce is a non-binary Niedecker. The persistence of becoming under forces who would prefer the decomposition of any lyric. Hope is the thing in stolen nail polish. Is.“I am the only one who can / keep myself going.”— Mathilda Cullen, author of Trace Happenings and creator of Woe Eroa"Reaching for states of dissipation, narrowing fluidity against absence, circling the round-about until you find your exit. Searching for Smoke Rings is no story of triumph. Have you ever tried to box a ring of smoke? It is a long stare into the center of a ring just before it spreads into the air. The voice of the poems and its cast of characters, friends and nameless neighbors, keep you company in the meantime, form gaps in the haze. The resolve of the work does not come in neat conclusion. It is the resolve of the speaker to turn to face, away from the hollow of decorated breath, and toward determination to exist, in recognition that the permission for this will never come."—Dod McColgan, activist and author of I Want You To Live

Published Works

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