Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021), Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and the Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, his poems have appeared in journals such as AGNI, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Raised in rural Maine, he now lives in San Francisco. 

“In the world of Rancourt’s poems, places hold memory and the past persists, whether acknowledged or not. ... The poems in this collection shift position and bend the light, wrestling with what to believe of the rainbow promises of 'never again.'"
—Erica Charis-Molling, the Los Angeles Review

“Harnessing new visions from the traditions of Mark Doty and James L. White, Rancourt crystalizes the modern sublime through intelligent, complicated, and elegiac modes of inquiry through the plights and heights of the human body. Through embodied desires both difficult and triumphant, these poems recast their dreams with a deft touch of wit, poise, and an openness for transformation equal to their ambition to preserve the past and its ghosts. Bravo.”
—Ocean Vuong

“What does it mean to have survived a plague? Are we obliged to remember a disaster, or are we best called to make our own joy independent of the past? The poems in Brocken Spectre document a queer new age—one in which the AIDS crisis has abated, though the lost quietly ghost the periphery of this writer’s imagination. These moving and memorable poems speak from edges of longing and loss while they create important new narratives of meaningful connection.”
—Mark Wunderlich

“Delving into the nature of memory, both cultural and emotional, the poems of Broken Spectre are sharp, dauntless, and unflinchingly lucid. Navigating the powerful undertow of amnesia and a future that has already passed by, Jacques J. Rancourt’s lyrics alert us both to time’s layers and to the wonder of its elasticity. I admire the great tenderness these poems convey toward those who preceded them and how, in Rancourt’s hands, hauntings become inheritances worth having, even in a world on fire.”
—Mary Szybist