Jonah Hall

Involuntary Astronauts Jonah Hall

Involuntary Astronauts is a collection of poems and essays written between August, 2019 and July 2020. The work deals with a set of recurring themes: the life of parenting a toddler, identity, anxiety, illness, disconnection, wonder and love. It's now been three years since Rebelle Harmony was born and I started writing poems again. This is collection number three. My goal is to continue collecting a year's worth of poems and essays every summer and keep publishing them. Twenty years ago, I wrote with the fantasy of earning a living from writing. The pretensions and egomania of youth have been worn down by time. Now, the process is edifying and the end result is secondary...which makes the idea of self-publishing the poems somewhat arbitrary. Why bother going through the process of organizing--and briefly editing--a year's worth of poems I've emailed to myself? Perhaps to document life. The poems are the stuff of my one life. A daily dispatch from the semi-conscious. Perhaps because reality is flimsy and now turned inside-out, after nearly four months of sheltering-in-our-home...and a select few other homes of toddler parents. Perhaps like anyone who writes, the idea of seeing the words on a printed page-not a screen-is the reason. To establish a simple fact: I exist. Natasha and I exist. Rebelle Harmony exists. Regardless of what is closed or open, regardless of how we deal with each day as it comes...we are here.