I’m so pleased to announce the release of this full-length collection by L.A. poet Jonathan Yungkans. Borrowed from Heaven features poems, prose, and photographs selected by yours truly in collaboration with the author, from his works produced during 2012–2025.

Cover image Rincon Beach © 2014 by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

Released by MacQ Books on 15 May 2026, Borrowed from Heaven (176 pages) is available from booksellers such as Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Bookshop.org; and Waterstones.

From the Back Cover:

In Borrowed from Heaven, Jonathan Yungkans has gathered work that spans 13 years—luminous poems that bear witness to a clear-eyed and tender attentiveness to the physical world, poems that are visual and lyrical, meditative and soulful.

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia and Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

At times literal, at times surreal, Yungkans’s probing poetic reflections on art and life challenge the fast read, as good writing must.... Take your time with this one: treasures await.

—Kendall Johnson, author of Writing for Vision and Chaos & Ash

Jonathan Yungkans writes at the threshold where memory, myth, and the sensory world converge.

—Katherine McDaniel, Editor of Synkroniciti Magazine

An Excerpt:

cross

diagnosis the position of the Christ’s head
—Adrian Bouter¹

cold rolls its marbles between floorboards and feet 
which shuffle 
		    toward an assembly-line crucifixion 
past Siqueiros’s crucifixion mural on Olvera Street2 
in the City of the Angels 
				    reduced to the whitewash 
that Anglo sanctimony insists is Lamb’s blood 


pure as the obelisk’s white in Manzanar cemetery 
the site surrounded by blue peaks 
						  desert brown
while Siqueiros’s eagle watches from its perch atop 
the native’s cross 
			  scandalizing the quaint heritage 
evoked and romanticized for tourists and feet move 


as they shuffle toward an assembly-line crucifixion 
what’s left 
		 to sing but my country hates for thee 
sweet land of cruelty while boards and knees groan 
and Christ weeps blood 
				   which drips down a mirror 
whose silver plate behind its glass is greyish skin 


while my fourth-grade teacher’s black eyes stare 
Christ in and around me the hope of glory 
							     as she 
tells the class about when she was sent as a child 
to Manzanar 
            	   toward an assembly-line crucifixion 
as ICE’s helicopters hover and fly past day and night 


* * 


and Dad mentioned one night that he had met Trump 
when Dad was shuttling 
				    between LA and New York 
and he told me “I thought he had some good ideas” 
and I wonder 
		    how good those ideas really were Dad 
as I watch a video of ICE agents in helmets and camo 


running after brown people fleeing for their lives 
as they swarm a car wash down the street 
							      agents 
cradling assault rifles not aiming or shooting them 
like they did Renée Good 
				     when she pulled away 
guilty of nothing more than writing poetry 


but you never did get a handle on writing poetry 
did you Dad 
		   with me or anyone else so maybe 
it was a crime and she was a white girl driving 
as Siqueiros’s eagle 
			      keens over and over loud 
sounding a cross between a cheer and a scream 

—After David Alfaro Siqueiros³

—Stanzas 1-4, which appear above the asterisks, were first published as the poem “via crucis” in Synkroniciti (Vol. 7, No. 4, Patterns, Fall 2025).⁴