Welcome to The Black Dog Speaks, where the poems of Jake Bandit gather in a room built for stillness, clarity, and the wildness that moves beneath both.

Bandit’s work begins in solitude, not through exile, but as inheritance. Growing up in the Midwest meant learning to live with long silences, wide distances, and the plaintive odds that shape a life before you even know you’re in it. Broken families, rough times and thin chances threading through the years, leaving one with few choices and the sense that you have to build yourself from whatever pieces remain. These are the early landscapes behind his voice. Things that teach us to listen closely, to survive by paying attention.

The writers who helped him turn that survival into meaning remain close: Raymond Carver with his spare mercy, Charles Bukowski with his unvarnished truth, WB Yeats with his haunted music, Czeslaw Milosz with his moral weather. And alongside them, the larger, risk‑taking voices who taught him how to reach: Hart Crane with his ecstatic architecture of feeling, Muriel Rukeyser with her fierce belief that poetry must confront the world rather than retreat from it, and of course, Mary Oliver and the never ending search for meaning. Their influences form a wide scaffolding behind each line - a blend of the quiet, the calm, and the willingness to question everyone and everything.

New pieces are available free for a limited time; archived work is accessible through a modest donation or a subscription to the Dog Pound.

Links to Bandit’s first book, Black Dog, appear above.

We’re glad you’re here. Let the black dog speak and perhaps the answers will reveal themselves.