True Believer - Paperback

by Jeff Kass (Author)

"True Believer is Jeff Kass at his best: reflective and clobbery, nerdy and dynamic, witty and wise."--Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F*ck to Sleep and The Golem of Brooklyn

In True Believer, Jeff Kass intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of good

Through lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass's poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer--attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son's baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass's understanding of his own identity.

An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers, True Believer is a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can't be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.

Author Biography

Jeff Kass teaches Tenth Grade English and Creative Writing in Ann Arbor MI. He's the award-winning author of Knuckleheads, 2011's Independent Publishers Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011 as well as two full-length poetry collections, My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book. He has taught poetry classes and workshops to thousands of students and is a recipient of a prestigious 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship for writers who teach in public schools.