"Innovative and incisive, lyrical and illuminating, Jefferson Navicky’s project inhabits the interior existences of artists and artmaking. This is a painterly-poetic narrative that burrows into the heart; that asks us to see and feel the intricacies of these lives, these imaginations, and our own."
— Myronn Hardy, author of Radioactive Starlings
"Gorgeous and sweeping, lyrical yet grounding, Jefferson Navicky's words felt both otherworldly and at home in my head and heart as I was reading this delicious book. As an artist and islander, I savored his story's whispered secrets on legacy and art, family and individuality, and consumed Navicky's bite-sized prose with delight and wonder."
— Mira Ptacin, author of The In-Betweens
“Jefferson Navicky’s work of fiction is many things: a frolicsome, inventive and thoughtful work of the imagination, a meditation on the vastness of a human life; and a poem that gives shape to human longing, regret, and the inevitable passage of time. Three generations of artists inhabit this large world, with their memories, visions, failures, and loves. The eighty-two short chapters are infused with the light and sound of the ocean—its changeability, its power and beauty.”
— Eleanor Morse, author of Margreete's Harbor
“Peculiar, beautiful, beguiling…There is good heat here, like the hot sauces Bird uses, and sauce serves as paint, as creative juice, as flavor enhancer, as ingredient uniter.”
— Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Sunday Globe (full review)
"With grief disguised as a 'good sauce,' Navicky bends time between the living and the dead like a crab listening to the hum of her ancestors through her own seaweed–slicked shell."
— Amanda Dettmann, The Cafe Review (full review)
Maine Literary Award jurors described Antique Densities as “formally beautiful, linguistically playful, and conceptually elegant. Never over-serious, Navicky's poems demonstrate a thorough—and rich—understanding of what prose poetry has done and can do.”
Among the many delights awaiting the lucky reader of this book, perhaps the greatest is the utter unpredictability of its language. In these pages, one encounters a diverse array of familiar figures, from pop singer Justin Beiber to legendary literary critic I.A. Richards. Like the elements of a dream, these personages are both themselves and not themselves, and as one reads one begins to wonder if one isn't also becoming not-oneself, but someone wholly else, perhaps a character in the book's pages. Antique Densities is a joyful counter-spell to the curse of disenchantment, a long, beautiful string of unforeseeable sentences. And as Gaston Bachelard asks in The Poetics of Space, a book that bears some secret kinship with this one, "if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship to freedom?
— Kristen Case, author of Principles of Economics and Little Arias
Antique Densities, short prose poems, “parables and other experiments,” are rarely more than a page in length, yet there is nothing miniature about them. First, there is the beauty of the writing: page after page of the coziest, most unsettling characters and situations thus far found, in Maine, in the 21st Century. Libraries open their doors on each page of this slim volume. You’ll see what I mean…These pages interlock, like ancient paving stone…all stories here will be found to serve each other, deeper and finer than I have known. Jefferson Navicky mentions writers he admires – Kafka, Borges, Cortazar, Yourcenar – “elders of influence.” They are no longer merely his models. With Antique Densities, Jefferson Navicky is their peer.
— Stephen Petroff, author of Philosophosphorescence
Antique Densities is a wild story-map of glowing imaginations, surreal hallucinations and timeless contemplations. There’s a dream-sequence to these winding narratives, one that reveals itself in layers of strange and beautiful meaning. In creating this collection, Jefferson Navicky has done that magical thing that so many writers and artists fear: he’s let his deepest literary influences wander rampant through the pasture of his consciousness, and the result is a stunning alchemy of authenticity and homage.
— Jaed Coffin, author of Roughhouse Friday
Antique Densities has the same sort of real, sort of unreal tenor [as Trout Fishing in America] and any fans left of Brautigan, Kafka, Borges or other uncategorizable writers should really dig this book. It will throw your head for a loop.
— Dana Wilde, Kennebec Journal (full review)
Tenderness animates the tension between preservation, archiving, and death…Not all is doom and mildew and dogears and silverfish in Navicky’s library. Most of his glowing gems remind us that within figurative language, dreamspeak and associational logic are the keys to imagination and liberation.
— Julian Mithra in Barrelhouse (full review)
With close attention to oral histories and faults of memory, Navicky’s work invites us to vulnerably enter new rooms of self–recognition while speaking to human limitations. We can never read everything; we often stare at screens to ingest two seconds of a story. Navicky poses: What if we started seeing books on the floor as casualties?...By paradoxically placing enduring language inside ephemerality, Navicky welcomes return, suffering, expansive holding, and an unrealized freedom surviving any sticky shelf life.
— Amanda Dettmann in The Cafe Review (full review)
One of the many pleasures of Antique Densities is its adherence to the singular conceit of a deconstructed library, a Borgesian place suggested by Jeffrey Haste’s cover art, an abstract portrayal of columns overlaid with recognizable shapes, one of them a set of stairs, another two arched windows framing clouds.
— Jeri Theriault in The Maine Sunday Telegram (full review)
The reader does not always anticipate where the poem is going, but Navicky controls the pace and message of the verse so the endings of the poems are logical and meaningful. The reader needs to pay particular attention to the punctuation because it controls much of the precise meaning. The book is a good read.
— Lynette G. Esposito in North of Oxford (full review)
The Book of Transparencies
(KERNPUNKT Press, December 2018)
"In Jefferson Navicky’s novel, a dreamy scholar pursues the history of a book he’s obsessed with. Navicky’s writing reminds me of late Melville, the Melville of Pierre, familiar and grave from evasion and obsession. His characters travel from “country to country, from mountain to asylum, from object to archive,” under the shadow all lovers must serve and all writers must eventually, and with great sadness, shake off to begin our work. In doing so, Navicky has created a rare document of pain and pleasure. A promising, poetic debut."
— Kevin Killian, author of IMPOSSIBLE PRINCESS
"Jefferson Navicky has created a delight of a debut for its sensuality and invention, its handling of light alongside the deepest dark. The Book of Transparencies is a rarity of its own making, an existential novella in which prose merges with poetry to explore topics of common interests–––love and loss, art and travel, the permanence and impermanence of nature and phenomenon–––in uncommon ways, eluding conventional form, until the reader understands she is standing before a work of innovative fiction and the untethered imagination of its creator. Herein, readers will find a matrix of perspective–––author within author within author–––both illuminating and dark."
— Jodi Paloni, author of THEY COULD LIVE WITH THEMSELVES
"…a stream-of-consciousness tour de force, created through free association rather than logic. ... it is not for the story that one reads it, not even for the characters, but for the process of reading itself, and for the insight it gives into the process of writing."
— Laura Nicoara, Heavy Feather Review (full review)
Review of The Book of Transparencies by Dana Wilde in OFF RADAR.
The Paper Coast
(SPUYTEN DUYVIL, MARCH 2018)
“How I loved meandering up and down this fog-laden Paper Coast with Jefferson Navicky. His characters—shadow creatures—stilled me with their strange secrets and yearnings, and their fragmented visions and obsessions—time, memory, ghosts, wolves, islands, books from the past—blended into a mysterious and haunted and thrilling whole.”
– Robin MacArthur, author of HALF WILD and HEART SPRING MOUNTAIN
“In Jefferson Navicky’s The Paper Coast, we find the vicissitudes of translators and sea captains; flotsam and fonts; swans and wax cylinders and burials at sea. Sometimes ghostly, sometimes arch, sometimes laugh-out-loud scatological, its stories hold the scent of salt, pine, and ether; of coffee, old books, and sardines. To read The Paper Coast is to immerse in the librarial alchemy of Borges crossed with the profane whimsy of Brautigan, infused with Dickensonian flint and slant, the blue and brume of a certain coastal Maine. Navicky’s tales are curious, beautiful, transcendent. His sentences are luminous.”
– Megan Grumbling, author of BOOKER'S POINT
Review of The Paper Coast by Dana Wilde in The Morning Sentinel
Review of The Paper Coast by Bill Bushnell in The Kennebec Journal
Uses of a Library
A chapbook of prose poems about libraries published in Triple #6 from Ravenna Press, including “Me & Borges” originally published in Cafe Irreal, as well as “Uncuttable” originally published in Front Porch Journal.