Available March 2024!
Reluctant Prophets
Available from Moon Tide Press, March 2025.
This is J.D. Isip's third full-length collection of poetry and prose pieces.
Scroll to read early praise for Reluctant Prophets...
Denton Loving
Isolation can be enforced by others or self-imposed. It can cause us harm and serve as a sanctuary. The prose and poems in J.D. Isip’s work read like a world geography of these paradoxes—of all the places where we can find ourselves alone, of all the paths that lead us into aloneness and back out, and of why we sometimes need to learn “how to alone ourselves inside ourselves.” From Walt Disney to David Foster Wallace, from the biblical Saul to Superman, no one merges the contemporary with the classical more seamlessly. Rather than reveling in personal tragedy, Isip reveals a carefully crafted art of survival, always keeping his eyes turned to the light.
Anders Carlson-Wee
Suicide, loneliness, grief, overwhelming heartache—Reluctant Prophets never shies away from life’s “pile of pain.” Yet within these lively pages you’ll find an even larger abundance of beauty and humor and love—not easy love, but the kind of love that rescues “some almost dead thing nobody was gonna buy.” In poems that showcase an immense tonal range, J.D. Isip urges you to choose to “Live a little longer,” and through the power of your own mind, to find a way to laugh and thrive despite the contradictions and confusions of this world.
cynthia atkins
Reluctant Prophets, J.D. Isip’s unabashed and revelatory collection is a courtship of innocence, sensuality, and raw discovery of self in a brutal and pre-ordained world. The writer masterfully weaves images into a sentient light of self-determination to find a place to fit in. “Let us allow ourselves the luxury of another dimension.”With a ferocious lyrical acuity that comes with attentive observing, we find a wise and tender heart at the end of every poem. Isip’s pieces expose the polarities and the hypocrisies of faith and culture.From Jesus and the Prophets to the beautiful friendship of Frog and Toad—the poet unravels and deconstructs the scaffolding to rid the decorum and rebuild an honest identity. A testimonial to the way language allows “Every story a hint at immortality,” these poems are a clarion call to disarm the cloud of unknowing, to open a portal to the ineluctable pulse of our humanity—Read this book for an indelible light.
Richie Hofmann
Reluctant Prophets is a capacious and memorable book of tight allusive lyrics and sprawling, light-dappled prose. Its hopeful, relentless vision is one of “our tiny hands and tiny minds / grasping for whatever it is we hope will love us back.” Drawing inspiration from sacked cities of the past and from new American wastelands, J.D. Isip’s forthright and forceful poems court beauty in a world of decay.
