Jackson Dean Chase writes poetry for outsiders, creators, old souls, cat people, and anyone who has ever tried to make something meaningful out of a difficult life.

His poetry is direct, personal, sometimes bleak, frequently darkly funny, and deliberately accessible. It draws from the counterculture tradition of writers such as Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison, and Frank Stanford while maintaining a voice of its own.

The subjects range widely—creativity, poverty, grief, depression, love, mortality, cats, horror, Christmas, identity, and the stubborn need to keep going—but the underlying approach remains the same:

Say something real.

Strip away what does not belong.

Make every line earn its place.

Raw Underground Poetry

Jackson’s poetry is collected primarily in the Raw Underground Poetry series.

The books range from large collections to tightly focused chapbooks, but all share an emphasis on emotional honesty, compression, rhythm, strong imagery, and language intended to communicate rather than obscure.

The series includes poems about artists struggling to create, people living at the margins, relationships, loneliness, grief, animals, monsters, death, survival, and the strange humor that can exist alongside all of them.

Bukowski’s Ghost

Bukowski’s Ghost: Poems for Old Souls in New Bodies is Jackson’s first major poetry collection and the foundation of the Raw Underground Poetry series.

Its 120 poems explore creativity, anger, loneliness, despair, life, death, and the sometimes self-destructive compulsion to create.

The collection won Best Poetry Collection at the 2016 eFestival of Words.

“This is an honest, intense, and remarkable collection by a fresh and powerful new voice.”

— Terry Trueman, Printz Honor author of Stuck In Neutral

Poetry About Creativity and Authenticity

Creativity is one of the recurring subjects throughout Jackson’s poetry. That theme moves from the artistic struggle and outsider perspective of Bukowski’s Ghost into the more openly affirmative Be the Magic: Poems to Ignite and Inspire Creativity.

Be the Magic focuses on passion, authenticity, happiness, rejection, creativity, and the importance of becoming more fully yourself rather than reshaping yourself to satisfy everyone else.

The underlying idea is simple:

Your passion is not something to apologize for.

It is part of what makes you who you are.

Cats, Humor, Grief, and Companionship

Cats occupy an unexpectedly large place in Jackson’s poetry. They can be comic characters, companions, witnesses, symbols of independence, reminders of mortality, or simply cats doing what cats do.

Love at the Bottom of the Litter Box and Death of a Scratching Post explore creativity, loneliness, poverty, grief, love, loss, death, and everyday life through poems in which cats are always somewhere nearby.

Crazy Cat Poems for Crazy Cat People combines those collections with additional cat-themed poems into a larger volume.

The subject may sound whimsical.

The poems frequently are not.

Horror and the Macabre

Jackson’s fiction influences also cross directly into his poetry. Worms Ate Your Face turns toward zombies, vampires, werewolves, monsters, death, Halloween, and the darker side of human nature.

As elsewhere in his work, horror is rarely just about the monster.

Sometimes the monster is supernatural.

Sometimes it is human.

Sometimes it is looking back from the mirror.

Christmas for the Rest of Us

Christmas Eve in the Drunk Tank approaches the holidays from considerably farther away from the greeting-card aisle. Its poems deal with Christmas, winter, New Year’s Eve, alcohol, grief, loss, mortality, melancholy, and dark humor. The result is holiday poetry for people who understand that December can contain sadness and absurdity alongside celebration.

Complete Poetry Bibliography

Raw Underground Poetry

• Be the Magic: Poems to Ignite and Inspire Creativity
• Bukowski’s Ghost: Poems for Old Souls in New Bodies
• Christmas Eve in the Drunk Tank: and Other Horrible Holiday Poems
• Crazy Cat Poems for Crazy Cat People: The Complete Bukowski, Cats, and Me
• Death of a Scratching Post: Bukowski, Cats, and Me
• Love at the Bottom of the Litter Box: Bukowski, Cats, and Me
• Worms Ate Your Face: Horror Poems for Goths and Ghouls

Reviews

“This is an honest, intense, and remarkable collection by a fresh and powerful new voice.”

— Terry Trueman, Printz Honor author, on Bukowski’s Ghost

“I have never read a book that touched me so deeply. Jackson’s honesty is open and raw, like a wound.”

— Amazon reviewer on Crazy Cat Poems for Crazy Cat People

“It connects with you on a profound level.”

— Tom Adams, author of The Psychonaut, on Death of a Scratching Post

“Magnificent. You can tell that the words come straight from his soul.”

— Amazon reviewer on Worms Ate Your Face

Poetry as Part of the Larger Work

Jackson does not treat poetry as separate from his fiction.

Writing poetry helped shape his approach to prose: compression, rhythm, imagery, voice, emotional immediacy, and the discipline of making individual words matter.

Those same instincts appear throughout his fiction and other creative work.

A poem has very little room to hide weak language.

Learning to work inside that constraint helped develop a broader creative principle that continues across formats:

Say what matters.

Cut what doesn’t.

Leave something behind.

Explore More

• Explore Fiction
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• Influences & Inspirations
• About Jackson