Los Osos-based Jad Josey has been always writing poetry in the background of his other writing pursuits. From a young age, he was rewriting other artists' song lyrics, writing screenplays, later to become a master of short fiction and its even shorter sibling—flash fiction. Only in the last decade did he start sharing his poems, sending them to places and magazines that publish poetry.
"These are two distinctive feelings," he says about poetry and prose in a conversation just a week before his stop at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, where he is set to read the poems from his first volume, Cast Your Longest Shadow, 2026. He is on the book tour and the iconic bookstore in Big Sur is a place he has been visiting regularly for four decades now.
"Poetry is mostly a mood," he explains, adding that poetry and flash fiction share one thing in common—every word and every sentence matters.
The volume contains his most recent poems, with the oldest from 2021 and 2022. Some are very new. Many of them are meditations on passing moments, always full of nature and aware of the natural world around—fig trees, frogs, but also cosmic events, such as a passing of a comet.
"We stare through
windows at horses in the pasture,
imagine saddle and bit and reins
instead of freedom."
The above verse from a poem titled "Inflorescence" is a good example of simple but universal discoveries Josey makes for himself and the readers in his poetry, often moody, going through difficult emotions, but always on the lookout for a philosophical solution.
Josey holds degrees in English Literature from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where he also taught. One of his specialities is Spanish literature and he enjoys many Latino poets. When it comes to Americans, he lists Ada Limón, Danez Smith and Maggie Smith, among others. When it comes to short fiction, he currently adores Lauren Groff.
John Steinbeck's East of Eden is his favorite book and he is a proud Steinbeck completist.
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