"How can the world be anything but a music made out of what we are, a jagged tune, a knife song, a wild blood and bone aria? In Rob Talbert's energetic, frightening, human, kinetic collection we can hear every note. I want to download this book into the musical score it is and listen to it whenever I'm alone but desperately need the world." -Matthew Dickman "Rob Talbert's Jagged Tune is a gorgeous post-industrial lyric hymn to minimum-wage jobs: from corrections officer to pawn shop employee to cruise ship attendant to insurance certificate specialist to retail clerk to unemployed and back again, Talbert's poems-hewn from life experience-contrast the constraints of work with the ecstasy of nightclubs, their "feral engine" and "deep recess of liquor techno." "My life depends on night," he writes, and this is a nocturnal book that embraces the wonder of darkness, its broken song. I am awed by these poems-their unyielding eye, their deft music, their capacity for wisdom, and all the ways in which they illuminate facets of the American experience that we rarely see." -Erika Meitner