The Man with Many Pens is about love—“a love that smells so much like blood”—and song—“a song that the oak leaves will not finish.” These poems examine how a single love or a single song contains multiple personalities and contradictory forces, tensions and concordances. Beneath those poems such as “The Man with Many Pens,” “The Six-Armed Musician” and others that display the multiple complex emotions of love, there is a more naked, personal narrative.

Jonathan Wells's poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The New Yorker, Poetry International, and other journals. He has also edited an anthology of poems about rock music, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll (MTV Books 2007) and is the author of Train Dance (Four Way Books 2011). Wells has worked as director of Rolling Stone Press and is co-editor of the Tebot Bach New World Translation series with Christopher Merrill.