What Have You by Jamie Albrecht

Jamie Albrecht’s wildly uncategorizable book, passionately self-critical, unflinching in its attempts to contain it all—high theory, Ke$ha, Hoarders, cruising scenes and convenience-store receipts, the restless assemblage of voices near and far—tests its own limits to articulate a lovingly skeptical posture toward futurity. This book, in all its viscosity and accretion, isthe future: it’s a book for a new generation of poets who are reaching for something different in the language that saturates and haunts us.

— Julia Bloch, author of The Sacramento of Desire


This book reads as a series of dazzling intertextual intimacies. Every aspect of the page and its margins are cognizant. Footnotes breathe alive layer after layer, like daylighting underground rivers. The detritus of everyday: ephemera, ‘hauntology,’ lists, receipts, handwriting—become a deftly assembled “foxtrot of cognition.” Wade into this untethered tapestry of words, this adroit catalogue, and find “the whole mess of being a person.”  Jamie Albrecht reminds us that “no poem exists alone,” mixes cynicism with possibility, and asks “what underpins your vision” in this remarkable collection in which  “…you can / be anything without a noun—”

— Laynie Browne, author of Apprentice to a Breathing Hand


What Have You collects a young poet’s attentions—shards, lists, receipts, stories—made to cohere by tactic and aversion. It is a radiant record of how possibility becomes song. Albrecht leaves pages that open outward—piercing, poignant, prescient—so the promise lives on.

— Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want


“Oh, I overshared and confessed to an audience yet to come,” writes Jamie Albrecht. In a stunning debut, What Have You, Albrecht invites these audiences into an everything room that is the everything room and everything all at once. Brave with the wanting and the making of his own company, Albrecht’s book is a feat where “all this clutter clamors” meets “what was consuming/without destroying.” “[W]hat accretes” here are the materials of a dynamic and brilliant poet “trying to make a life worth living in the everything room.” Albrecht reveals the stuff—he revels in the stuff: the matter that matters. These are the poems that “participate in your arrangement” as you, too, might “pick from the mess and make do.”

— Michelle Taransky, author of Abramowitz-Grossberg



Jamie Albrecht (1999–2023) was a gifted writer and poet whose work reflected a deep sensitivity to language, memory, and listening. Born in Seattle and raised in Los Angeles, Jamie developed an early love of literature that would shape the course of his life and work. A 2022 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Jamie earned distinction as the recipient of the Creative Honors Thesis Prize for outstanding work in poetry. From 2020 to 2021, Jamie studied abroad at Mansfield College, Oxford, where the literary and historical richness of the setting left a lasting imprint. Jamie’s poetry was marked by intellectual rigor and emotional questioning, often exploring themes of identity, transience, and the natural world with both humor and depth. Though his time was brief, Jamie’s voice continues to resonate with those who encountered him and his work—poetry that speaks with brilliant force and enduring exploration.


Book Information:

· Paperback: 138 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-499-4