Recipient of the 2026 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry
In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth—movies, lore, graphic novels—these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.
As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.
Praise for Find Me When You’re Ready
“In Perry Janes we have a powerful new voice in poetry. Now LA based, but coming out of metropolitan Detroit’s eclectic body of poets, Janes writes in all genres, but at long-last comes Find Me When You’re Ready, a stirring debut poetry collection divided into five acts. Janes displays, beneath the skill acquired over years of ‘doing the work,’ an unabashed earnestness that suggests an authentic need to say what cannot be easily told. As he notes, there are ‘so many / routes to the heart’s city.’ Janes writes as if through a prism—from several vantages. He compellingly repeats, insists, retracts, and iterates details of stories in an attempt not to get to the ‘what’ of an event, but the ‘who.’ To whom has this happened and who has this storyteller become? Janes is at the core a storyteller, and as any good storyteller knows, memory has its demands—Janes is determined to meet them. Read this bildungsroman and you will be inspired by Janes’s unsparing commitment to self-reclamation and hard-won joy.”
—Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World
“If a book could be your best friend, could be the dreamt of gentle avenger who gets you through the hardest nights of childhood. If a book could let you know life is so hard, but just wait, and you will find a world where even the pain you endured will find a way to blossom into deep health, into the deeply generative erotic. If a book could say: yes, the city is burning, the world is burning, some wounds never heal: but look at all your beloveds assembling. If a book could go back in time and teach me how to become an adult and carry my losses and make a world of extraordinary beauty that never says those losses didn’t happen? God, that book would be this book. Find Me When You’re Ready. I have been waiting my whole life.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic
"Find Me When You’re Ready, in its imaginative daring and unabashed boldness, is both a testimony to the inescapable hold of memory and place as well as an interrogation about selfhood. Janes’s writing is filled with lyrical splendor, reflection, and attention to detail; this was a joy to read.”
—Airea D. Matthews, author of Bread and Circus
"Oh boy. This book. Perry Janes. Goddamnit. Thank you. Find Me When You’re Ready is a lyric confrontation with the kind of boyhood meant to keep you quiet. My Midwestern heart. My survivor-seen heart. Our hearts that are still, despite it all, our hearts. This book. This intimate debut collection has poems that sear and devastate, but also poems that play and beckon tenderness. Yes, somehow, tenderness. Here it comes! Get ready!"
—Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of Not Here
“Any writer of confessional poetry concerning a traumatic childhood event must confront a particular craft-problem: How much can a writer withhold while still carving the poetic outline around a trauma in such a way that it becomes art? Several poems in Perry Janes’ Find Me When You’re Ready manage precisely this question with humanity and grace. Still other poems in the book are about this question… Janes is interested in this problem of art-making; where the ethical overlaps with the aesthetic, we should ask: What does it mean to render something terrible into beautiful language? … You might expect a book orbiting a childhood trauma to not be much fun, but you’d be wrong; Find Me When You’re Ready turns on wit as often as it turns on drama. With titles that capture the absurdity of contemporary life (“Google Knows Literally Everything About You—Here’s How to Delete That Data;” “Survival Guide for Great Indoorsmen”) this book offers us moments of voice-filled humor, too.”
—Margaret B. Ray, author of Good Grief, the Ground, in The North American Review
“Janes' narrator is wildly explorative, urgently seeking, and energetically examining his own history, perception, and true nature. Each entry is an act of deconstruction, often zooming in on microscopic images that stand in for larger wholes… Janes' speaker claims he can "lance blood from any ear with a whisper" and hear "the little bells of a restless night ring before arrival," and we believe him. We plunge gladly into the meticulously articulated world both outside and inside of this narrator whose poetry is an act of public discovery. We feel discovered too, wanting, as the speaker does, to "hold the teacup handle of [our] partner's wrist and not to feel for fractures." Through humor and unflinching honesty, Janes uses language as a bulwark against confusion and diminishment—entertaining and beautiful.”
—The Eric Hoffer Award