Autobiography of an Unknown American is, variously, a book of lamentation and a book of praise, a field guide to lost corners in their American ubiquity, and a sustained encounter with the emptiness that American civilization shelters within itself. It is, in short, a dialogue of aftermaths and reckonings. The work’s tasks are poetical: to track the Unknown American across its vast continent—a fugitive figure of collective ancestry, memorable and mostly unremembered, appearing from time to time bearing the marks of a grace that misfits the future.
The book combines contemplative large-format photographs by Jason Francisco made across the United States between 2014 and 2022, plus marooned vernacular photographs he collected along his journeys, and poems by the acclaimed writer Alexander Nemerov, written in response to the photographs and sewn into the sequence as mini chapbooks. The book concludes with a lyric essay by Jason Francisco on the work’s genesis and its aims.
Available from Fall Line Press, spring 2026.
The photographic sequence for Autobiography of an Unknown American is above. The book design is indicated here, with two of Alexander Nemerov's ekphrastic poems.
