The Geometry of Departure

poems and drawings by Jason M. Marak

Print (softcover): $23.95
 

We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760.

The Geometry of Departure, Jason M. Marak's debut collection of fourteen-line poems, artwork, and associated one-hundred-word stories, charts a lyric journey interspersed with narrative glimpses of hard-luck couple Jimmy and Delta. From New York City's traffic-clogged arteries and unforgiving Midwestern plains,to West Coast redwood groves and wind-battered coastlines, their journeys are juxtaposed with another recurring couple, Thicket and Tree. Whether rooted in or moving through these disparate American landscapes, the characters navigate the magical and mundane searching for intersections, connections, proof, angles, and better angels while managing consequences of contact and separation with people, places, and the past. Marak's visual art reveals his literary creative process, integrating the scrawled notes and observations that become each connected story.

POETRY / General 

Released May 19, 2026; Copyright 2026

90 pages; 10 full-color images

Biographies

Jason M. Marak lives in his hometown in Humboldt County, California. Marak returned to Humboldt after a decade living in Tokyo, where he taught in the English Department at Temple University’s Japan campus. Prior to teaching, he worked as a hotel doorman in New York City, a grill cook, a house painter, and a garbage collector, and played semi-professional baseball for the Humboldt Crabs. Marak holds an MFA from Columbia University. His artwork, poetry, and prose have appeared in a variety of publications and galleries, including the Morris Graves Museum of Art, the Floyd Bettiga Gallery, Raritan, 100 Word Story, and The Paris Review. The Geometry of Departure is Marak’s debut collection.

Endorsements

“Jason M. Marak’s heartrending debut collection, The Geometry of Departure, proves pure American lyricism flourishes. Here, a lonely five-o’clock whistle carries across disparate regions of space and time, be they: Western redwood stand, a car ride with Willie Nelson on the radio, Blarney Stone Bar, or snapshot from one’s youth. Marak’s poems address a ‘locomotive need’ to be both seen and heard, offering the reader a synthesis of visual art and the written word. Throughout, the personas of Jimmy and Delta, Thicket and Tree embrace the sweetness and heft inherent in both connection and disconnection. Skillfully, Marak peels off layers of selfhood and then welds these ‘rusted, sharp’ pieces into vibrant, fourteen-lined revelations. A formidable achievement.”
—David Semanki, author of Ghost Camera

“Jason Marak's poems move with pickpocket precision, catching you unexpectedly and taking something from you before the words have hit. Marak's poems and drawings feed on the tension between grit and grace, where rough-edged reality becomes raw material for elegant transcendence.”
—John Dermot Woods, author of Mortals and The Baltimore Atrocities  

“Marak’s astounding first collection places itself in the lineage of work that engages with Rilke’s line ‘You must change your life.’ What makes The Geometry of Departure so moving and unique is the intimacy and humor of humbled speakers who ask: Can one ‘return to a place of potential’ when the navigational equipment is broken? These are voices from times when we become peripheral to ourselves: a lone woman in her car, an ex-lover waiting for the thaw, a ghostly smoker in a pool hall. In his weather-wrought world, Marak foregrounds erosion and ‘the underside of things’ as the starting node for transformational desire. Here is the heartbreaking knowledge of the monumental distance between the limitations of one’s battered personhood and aiming for the stars; and yet his underdogs endure. In the tension of his stripped-down lines and dexterous abstract drawings, we are triangulated into the rhythm and constellation of this slow dance of bodies. In turn, these atomized characters hold us in their thrall and echo the Springsteen-ian hope that ‘maybe everything that dies someday comes back.’ Who could turn down that dance?”
—Nida Sophasarun, author of Novice  

“Here is a book for zigzag wanderers, shipwrecked mariners, long-haul truckers, star-crossed lovers, emigrants, distance athletes, and all those orbiting far from home. Its poems, drawings, and microfictions find strength in formal discipline: each story is exactly one hundred words, each poem fourteen lines, each drawing the result of a shape’s reiterations. This is what it takes to achieve clarity in a world where connections are bad, syntax defiled, signals inundated with noise, ‘flags flown for years now useless.’ Jason Marak’s narrators struggle within set parameters, plotting vectors on a graph whose x and y axes might as well read pessimism of the intellect / optimism of the will. Delta, Jimmy, Thicket and Tree seek only to connect: mired to their eyeballs in slop and static, their efforts fizzle and flare. These well-turned recaps of their Sisyphean antics cut to the chase, and the bone.”
—Gabrielle Gopinath, writer and art critic, published in Sculpture, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Art Practical, San Francisco Art Quarterly, and the Oxford Art Journal

News and Reviews