Rogue Astronaut

About

Finalist, 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

At the core of Rogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobs’s debut poetry collection, is a mystery: Was the poet’s father abducted by aliens as a teenager? From this uncanny family lore spins a gravitational field of theory, grief, and imagination, spurring speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds: What are the limits of understanding between two alien anatomies, between two unlike minds? Are we, after all, finally alone?

In poems that continually veer from play to reverence, from body horror to bodily delight, encounters with bed bugs and cuttlefish appear side by side with retro gaming and phantom light. A brother living with delusions turns toward the sky. The poet also peers skyward in search of connection—across family lines, across the body’s borders, across galaxies. Outer space becomes a metaphorical terrain where queer desire and spiritual longing collide. Just as Agent Mulder’s iconic X-Files poster declares “I WANT TO BELIEVE,” so do these poems ache to trust in something more—extraterrestrial life, divine presence, intimacy.

Jacobs’s electrifying collection offers readers a singular voice attuned to the strangeness of living now—where science fiction and memory, tenderness and dissociation, belief and doubt pulse in tangled orbit. With wit, vision, and formal inventiveness, Rogue Astronaut charts a course through the mysterious and the intimate, inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting across distance, time, and the alien terrain of self.

Author

Mitchell Jacobs is a poet and translator from Minnesota. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, among other journals. He is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where he serves as managing editor of Ricochet Editions.

Praise

“In Mitchell Jacobs’s stunning debut, Rogue Astronaut, we’re invited to ask what the future holds for us in this age of ‘the earth’s vendetta / against flesh, which it punishes / and punishes then decomposes.’ These poems are meditations on the nature of the body as we struggle with our corporeal pleasures and failures even while imagining some future deliverance of a newly forged incorporeal self. These remarkable poems of human reckoning with fear and desire stand at the intersection of David Bowie’s Space Oddity and Frank Bidart’s The Book of the Body. The raw inner spaces of Jacobs’s poems are by turns both luminous and ominous, yet his vision is deeply intimate, and the universe he travels remains irreducibly human.” –David St. John

“Rogue Astronaut radiates an assuredness, a mastery of craft that belies the fact that it is Jacobs’s debut. I loved being flung headlong into this poet’s intergalactic imagination, where a cinematic, shapeshifting alien is hailed as the ‘Ultimate space queer, all costume, / stripping off everything but knowledge.’ A brother’s mental illness is at once otherworldly and yet all too real: ‘There is no tense in which he did not suffer.’ In poems rife with humor, musicality, and devastating acuity, Jacobs compassionately renders the fragile, contingent human body in tension with the absurdly infinite possibilities of the universe. (P.S. This book also contains the most erotic poem involving a French horn ever written.)” –Nicky Beer

“The remarkable poems of Jacobs are so alive to the mysteries of language and the body. They evince a linguist’s control of syntax and an artist’s delicious abandon: ‘Trying to escape the planet / of myself,’ he writes, ‘I invaded a lot of different people.’ Rogue Astronaut, his sensitive and dynamic debut, catalogs the ways we are tethered to the earth, to ourselves, and to one another.” –Richie Hofmann