Free Jam Down

Free Jam Down is an architecture of moving surfaces--rooms, streets, windows, screens and public spaces through which perception continually passes, is processed. Drawing on the idea that our contact with objects and environments occurs at their surfaces, Esteban Oloarte turns the poem into both art object and space of art: a place where private experience meets the built world. Here, looking is a form of movement. These poems travel through a shifting visual geography, breaking apart and being recomposed by what they encounter. As these spaces gather and overlap, the poem itself becomes a kind of threshold, an installation: a space where lived experience is refracted through the structures, surfaces and systems that shape how we live and who we are. 

Esteban Oloarte is a North American poet. His chapbook, Transitions, was shortlisted for the 2020 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and Transistor, his first book, was a finalist for The 2020 Pank Big Book Prize. His poems have appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Arc Poetry Magazine, among others. His second book, Bardo was published by Broadstone Books in 2022. He is currently finishing his first novel.