Assure Press has published Michael Minassian’s Jack Pays a Visit, a chapbook of poems centered around the character Jack Karapetian (1925-1994), who wrote under the pen name of Hakob Karapents. Born in Tabriz, Iran, Jack was a prolific Armenian-American writer who wrote almost exclusively in Armenian.
Robert Wexelblatt, author of Hsi-wei Tales and Girl Asleep and Other Poems, writes, “Jack haunts the poet like memory itself and is himself haunted “by the ghosts of Persian poets and forgotten deities.” With its short lines and striking similes, invoking folklore and fable, past joys and pains, Jack Pays a Visit is an intimate, eloquent and affecting testament with a dramatic revelation in its title poem.
Alan Walowitz, author of The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems and Exactly Like Love, writes, “Here’s Uncle Jack, a character the poet Michael Minassian has both created and, clearly, has attended to very carefully. How else to explain the wisdom, the wry humor, the depth that Jack and the poems about him embody? Jack—like Minassian—is a writer, but he’s grappling in his work and in his life with his displacement as a young man from his home in Persia, and from his Armenian roots. At the same time that Jack can say, “Who wouldn’t want/to be an American?” he also carries with him a weight—the tales from his lost youth and from his collective past that enrich him, sadden him, and, then, make him such a fascinating companion. Minassian’s poems in Jack Pays a Visit are remarkable for their humanity and for their wisdom.
Michael Minassian, a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University (BA) and California State University at Dominguez Hills (MA) was born in New York and has lived in New Jersey, California, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. A professor of English for 30 years at Broward College in South Florida, he also taught in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Jamaica, England and served as a consultant in Spain and Ecuador. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, A Matter of Timing and Jack Pays a Visit are all available on Amazon.
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