
The Queer Cartography of Self:
Arthur Jackson V’s From Paris, Lost Vegas, Home again
Some poets craft landscapes — others live them. In From Paris, Lost Vegas, Home again, Arthur Jackson V charts a deeply intimate terrain across continents, memories, and identities. Published by Westbrae Literary Group, this powerful collection is a luminous document of queer embodiment, travel, longing, and reckoning — a poetic memoir in three acts.
From the cobblestone courtyards of Paris to the smoky hush of Las Vegas bars and finally back to the streets of San Francisco, Jackson’s voice is unfiltered and fiercely present. At once lush and fractured, his work resists the idea that home is a place. Instead, it insists that home is a moment — a kiss, a prayer, a poem, a wound healed in language.
Arthur Jackson V: Poet, Witness, Cartographer of Feeling
Arthur Jackson V’s poetry doesn’t ask for permission — it arrives like weather, soaking into the reader’s skin. A Black, queer voice rooted in radical vulnerability, his lines pulse with memory, grief, beauty, and survival. Jackson’s debut with Westbrae Literary Group reads like a map of both sacred scars and sacred joys.
Dedicated to chosen family and artistic kin, the book honors not only his physical travels but his emotional and spiritual ones. It is at once an archive and a love letter — to Paris, to poetry, to the self that lives in multiplicity.
“From Paris”: A Pilgrimage of the Body and Spirit
The first section, From Paris, captures the aching elegance of a city so often imagined, but rarely felt the way Jackson feels it. In “To Refuse Divine Donation,” he writes:
“I found myself believing in God, sitting in Notre Dame praying après donating 2€ for a tea light candle… In a culture I wasn't yet apart of I felt involved, all encompassing so ritual.”
Paris here is not a postcard — it is a threshold. Desire, faith, and estrangement twine together in shadowy parks and cobblestone streets. The poems move through sensuality and longing, often queering sacred spaces. In “Arrondissement 16,” cruising becomes a kind of liturgy, lit by Prince’s music and spiderwebs that “catch their prey with the tricks of dangerous beauty.”
“Lost Vegas”: Drowning in the Mirage
Lost Vegas shifts tone and geography. If Paris is a city of light, Vegas is one of glittered shadow. Jackson dives into memory, addiction, and survival. The glamour cracks — revealing the tremble beneath the performance.
In “The Still Life of Lush,” he confesses:
“The job is supposed to help / in this land of dreams / But it’s landed me at the bar / a lush for an escape.”
Las Vegas becomes a place where spiritual malnourishment collides with routine escapism. But amid the ache is a hunger for resurrection. In “Sea-Legs,” he asks: “How do we forget our brightness?” — then reaches for rebirth, imagining a return to light through water, ritual, and reinvention.
“Frisco-Kid”: Where the Ink Dries
The final section, Frisco-Kid, is a homecoming — but not a neat one. San Francisco is a memory, a ghost, a lover both cruel and adored. The poems here burn with heartbreak and club lights, with trauma and tenderness. Jackson’s style becomes more kaleidoscopic, reflective of the chaos and beauty of trying to write oneself into wholeness.
In “Were the World Mine,” he imagines:
“my friends would share them to grow / forests where we kiss each other / with swollen lips and paint each other / the colors of a hungry sky.”
By the time we reach “You’ll Find Me Where the Ink Dries,” the poet has reassembled something from the scatter:
“I script myself by Arthur / Stronger than a reflection.”
It is here — in ink, in name, in memory — that Jackson offers not resolution, but reclamation.
Why This Book Matters
From Paris, Lost Vegas, Home again isn’t just a collection — it’s a testimony. In a world eager to flatten queer stories into tropes or trauma, Jackson gives us contradiction, joy, rage, sensuality, and silence. His poems hold the ache and the exhale, the candlelight and the barlight, the journey and the inked return.
For readers of contemporary queer poetry, this book offers a rare sense of presence — it does not flinch, it does not perform. It is.