We are shaped, each of us, by our own accidents, what Jason Irwin, in his gritty account, calls the vagaries, tracing his life in the rustbelt parentheses where “everything we’ve lost is gathered”: friends, family, the disjecta of abandoned rooms and factories, and most hauntingly, the clubfoot cynosure of the poet’s now severed limb, sympathetic to the surrounding music. “Like the song the dead sing,/or the cry of a newborn . . . We are shaped, each of us, by our own accidents, what Jason Irwin, in his gritty account, calls the vagaries, tracing his life in the rustbelt parentheses where “everything we’ve lost is gathered”: friends, family, the disjecta of abandoned rooms and factories, and most hauntingly, the clubfoot cynosure of the poet’s now severed limb, sympathetic to the surrounding music. “Like the song the dead sing,/or the cry of a newborn . . . the history of our comings and goings.” Poem after poem, Irwin stands his painful ground. His book shows us how the pivot foot gets planted and that circumference comes from that. ~Robert Gibb

With every line of Jason Irwin’s poems, our love for life is sharpened—even while those lines recount the losses, the heartaches, the hauntings, the treacheries of time. Here is “that dark, dreamy other world.” And here is comfort, companionship, longing, and then suddenly an acute sorrow that somehow makes us want more of the whole tragic beautiful thing, more of it, more… ~Jean LeBlanc

"My father asks me to go to church//and write the hymn numbers on a sheet of yellow paper./He read about a woman in Michigan who won the Powerball this way." Family love is all the more real for being volatile, spirituality deeper for being fueled at times by Black Mollies and Budweiser. Jason Irwin has created a world of visionary contingency and immanence. A History of Our Vagrancies is exemplary, a keeper and a gem. ~D. Nurkse

Over the course of three books (including this one) and two chapbooks, Jason Irwin has been developing an operatic account of disabled lives in a disabled city, Dunkirk in upstate New York. Once again, this latest book is studded with very fine poems—"Among Strangers," "County Fair," "Saint Max of the First Ward," "Kierkegaard, Dying"—that speak truthfully and musically of personal failures and social despair. Anyone who has trouble understanding why the white working class votes for Trump should read Jason Irwin's "Codgers." These expertly crafted narratives have acquired a new lyrical intensity in such poems as "Exile" and "Chopin's Heart," to which long and wide meditation has given fresh imagery and imaginative leaps. The title poem "The History of Our Vagrancies" brings a grand historical sweep to the portrait of this city. The poems that work less well for me in this collection shade too much into prose, sentimentality, or finger-wagging, but the number of hits is unreasonably high. Dunkirk, NY has found its troubadour. I can't wait to see a grand distillation from these books into a single majestic work. A song cycle, anyone? ~Jee Leong Koh