Circling Planes

Bushwhack Books has just released a new book of poems by Mike Jurkovic, Ulster County Poet Laureate, that read “like vandal stars fallen from God’s busy hands.”

With a trim size of five by seven inches, this softcover book has 86 pages. It was published in February 2026, and its ISBN is 9798900980348.

Reviews:

“Bold and unflinching. A vibrant and fearless offering from one of our region’s most distinctive voices.”  ~Jen Metzger, County Executive, Ulster County, NY

“Complex, urgent, and alive, this book is not just pretty—it’s a reckoning and a reclamation.”  ~Melissa Dvozenja-Thomas, Executive Director, Arts Mid-Hudson

“Poetry of the tactile, brimming with electricity in the air. The Beatnik nuts and bolts of life, real and imagined—this is a roller-coaster-of-the-mind of a read.”  ~Lenny DellaRocca, Editor, South Florida Poetry Journal

“Mike Jurovic writes like a jazz solo—improvised, incisive, and unafraid.”  ~Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram, Executive Director and Founder, DC Poetry Project

“Mike Jurkovic has a wonderful wit and dazzles the reader with it.”  ~Roger Aplon, Editor, Waymark: Voices of the Valley

About Mike Jurkovic:

His previous books include Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers, and AmericanMetal. He performs regularly and he has run Calling All Poets for nearly thirty years.  As a music reviewer, he had been both the Rock ‘n’ Roll Curmudgeon and a jazz critic. His poetry draws upon early Dylan, comic books, Kurt Vonnegut, the Beats, Richard Pryor, Patti Smith, the Mulligan stew of American music and culture over the past six decades. As he writes, “please keep the truth we carried into the war that threatens to silence the words we use to shorten the distance between us.”