Author

Hobratsch, Jonathan

Poet and teacher in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in creative writing from Texas State University and has taught at Drexel University since 2017. His book-length manuscript erroreum can translate as “the shrine of straying” or “house of wandering.”

Publications in The Rang Yan Review

Criticism

/face by William Lessard contemporary

Jonathan Hobratsch

In William Lessard’s /face, the violence of facial recognition exposes the historical continuity between imperial regimes of classification and contemporary infrastructures of surveillance, where the capture of identity reproduces the fundamental asymmetry between those who render the world legible and those rendered legible for their profit. This is a poetics of dispossession that turns the fractured architectures of digital language against the machinery of its production, demanding that we confront the political conditions under which a face can still claim sovereignty over its own existence.

  • poetry
  • criticism
  • surveillance
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Poetry

Sections 16–20 of erroreum contemporary

Jonathan Hobratsch

The poems turn fractured perception, cultural memory, and the absurdities of everyday life into a poetics of formal instability. Through cracked mirrors, disrupted allusions, and linguistic play, they expose the contradictions of a world in which history, identity, and meaning resist coherence, while even the sacred becomes inseparable from the ordinary and the absurd.

  • poetry
  • contemporary
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