Ugly Ground Swell Moss by Jacob Schepers

Jacob Schepers does not gaze into the skies in inspiration for his poetry, but looks down into the ground, to find a strange drama with the characters “ugly ground” and “swell moss.” In this curious and ultimately entrancing meditation on agency, belonging and otherness, Schepers has written an anti-epic of rotting, heaving matter, seepage and flowering. Surprisingly, everything he—and we—need can be found at his feet.

— Johannes Göransson

Poetry commits itself to thinking with—and through—indeterminacy. I was reminded of this when Jacob Schepers’ Ugly Ground Swell Mossripped me from the despairing pulse of our contemporary teleology and back into being, back among the ways of conceiving alternate ontologies. If facile taxonomies erase how relationality alters its subjects, the Thou in the moss “knows of some face of you you cannot.” Moss leaves its glistening traces on pronouns; the subject is revealed through proximities and exchanges. Each inch and instance of being touches the Other in this material poetics of queer beholding; identity crumbles into something besides its usual constituent parts. A tender and often tremulous beauty in Schepers’ rigorous attention to the presence of the smallest. “O, soften more often!”—for no material matters more than the radical possibilitizing of “If only” that seeps through Schepers’ apostrophes. 

— Alina Stefanescu

Ugly Ground Swell Moss recalls the creation narrative—Genesis, Day Three —where the theme is vegetation emerging. Rather than speak individual plants into existence, the Sayer in this Genesis puts soil and greenery into conversation, goading them into a heart-to-heart. The mode here is not only lyric pastoral but love song and language query. What would Ground and Moss say if they could talk to one another? How might they respond to the lexis the poet wields in prodding them? On display in this sprawling, fecund poem is a heady and playful consideration of what it means to be a friend of the soil, an earthling performing the Adamic function. In Schepers’ explosive free-for-all, we find ourselves at what T.S. Eliot called “frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail though meanings still exist.” This is a thoughtful book and a whole lot of fun.

— L.S. Klatt

Ugly Ground Swell Moss is a book-length experimental project exploring identity through mutual, sometimes conflicted, ways of knowing and not-knowing. Resembling, on the one hand, a collection of lyrical odes in their insistence on address to personified objects and, on the other hand, a philosophical proposition about knowing and understanding those closest to us, the claims and questions in Ugly Ground Swell Moss explore the identities and relationships of the two title characters within a deceptively sparse ecosystem of lush longing and allegorical desire. Written at the intersection of the philosophy's ethical obligations and the supposedly "fixed" nomenclature of taxonomic classification, this series evokes the possible connections at continually shifting meeting points.

Born and raised in Michigan, Jacob Schepers received his PhD and MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he is now the Outreach Specialist for the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good and teaches in the University Writing Program. He is the author of two poetry collections, A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014) and Ugly Ground Swell Moss (Carbonation Press, 2026), as well as the chapbook Connections & Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). A Best-of-the-Net nominee, he has published his writing in places like antiphony, Blue Bag Press, The Common, CAPGRAS, Dialogist, Heavy Feather Review, Hobart, Greensboro Review, Indianapolis Review, MEMEZINE, North Dakota Quarterly, Psaltery & Lyre, The Shore, Swing, Verse, and elsewhere. With Sara Judy, he co-edits ballast, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary journal. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and their four children.

Paperback: $16. ISBN: 978-1-105-68649-8

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