B>O<O>K<S####RE/Ad+_+_+++___++___&(*&)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Okay, behind. Let’s go. building a Buffalo community around poetry, R.D. Pohl in conversation with Edric Mesmer (edition of 99). Another installation of Mesmer’s prolific poet’s history of Buffalo, this time with the longtime literary journalist and curator R.D. Pohl. Fascinating insights into major lit institutional shifts, the Buffalo News’ improbable poetry column (now gone due to corporate purchase and consequent enshittification of the paper). Bob published short stories. Who knew! Pohl shows up to things through thick and thin. More than I can say for my overwhelmed self. We need more literary journalists like this. ? |\?|/ ?|\?| / ?|\?| / ?|\?|/ ? |\?|/ ?|\?|/ ?|\?|/ ?|\?|/ The Skeleton Key Poems (chapbook, capsule press, n.d. – 2026?) by Will Stanier. Typewritten then photocopied mini-chap. Send me ephemera like this any time, that which can be slipped in the small unclaimed moments of the day. It gets read while the stack of books casts a longer and longer shadow. “They told me dolphins invented graffiti” ||||| final line of “Gamma-Eclipse-Shucking-Street-Graffiti.” **#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#**#* *#**#**# In The Roar of the Machine by Zheng Xiaoqiong trans. Eleanor Goodman (Giramondo, 2022) Xiaqiong (b. 1980, Nanchong, Sichuan, China) is often called the most well-known contemporary Chinese migrant worker poet – a group of poets first introduced by the White Pine press Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry. She might just be the most well-known contemporary Chinese poet. And she might be my favorite contemporary poet. She writes in long clattering lines that balance strange subject shifts and juxtapositions with an absolute dedication to naming the stuff of the world—the objective world—that constitute a life fixed in a place by repetitive work. From her avalanching ten page “In the Hardware Factory”: “and you’re nothing but a lump of iron, thinking of words involving iron / like sheen, iron oxide, cast iron, steel, thinking of its sharpness/ and the pain it causes as it pricks the body, thinking of its enormous / spindles, pulverizing dreams into powder, thinking of its steel needle / sewing up a wound, if needed” or “polishing poems amid machines, moulding it with iron and blueprints, life is / this toil, the burning heat of the hardware workshop, electric saws and steel hammers, the sago palms on the windowsill, the palms outside / traditional food, they’re formed into frames, strips, shapes, like ancient doctrines / you hold tight to Japanese silk roses, German gears, imitation calipers.” Hope you’re seeing how intricately Xiaoqiong employs repetition. The poems will speak to anyone whose spent their 6th straight day on a ten hour night shift wondering what all that work is pounding out of them. A whole hell of a lot of people. But they also contain their own particularities, of being a female factory worker (the majority of light industrial workers are women from global majority countries), of being a migrant worker (a particular status of worker who enjoys less access to the social safety net, a condition more and more frequent across the globe as corporations perfect ways to displace and entrap workers in superexploitative conditions). And of course the poems are their own thing in excess of all these things, no more than when the long lines telescope subjects of vastly different scales into a just so unity: “the women are fish, working night and day, dragging along / the boss’s order forms, profit, the GDP, youth, visions, dreams.” In a country at least duly interested in international lit, we’d be reading the shit out of these poems. The vision of these poems also stands in stark contrast to a recent, dispiriting U.S. anthology of poems about work I’ve been browsing. Where Xiaoqiong’s poems light up individual subjectivity, a larger collective subjectivity, and industrial settings all enmeshed in each other, the poems in this anthology, firmly in 1-page lyric narrative mode, seem so utterly st-kerosene lantern-uck in the mode of individual commenting on their experiences with work. They assert a fundamentally false division between the self and work—a self that can be extracted from work; the sick truth is that our subservience to labor is constantly speaking through us! It’s in the pith of our core and surround; it’s when we’re on the clock and off. In preserving the autonomy of their subjectivity, well, they fail. And—here we’ll become a prosody freak—their rhythms lose something that Xiaoqiong-Goodman’s rumbling lines almost always make evident. \{|[]]]]]]][ \{| []]]]]]][ \{|[] ]]]]]][ \{|[]]]]]]][ \{| []]]]]]][ \{|[]]]]] ]][ \{|[]]]] ]]][ \{|[]]]]]]][ \{|[]]]]]]][ \{|[Poems of Thanks: Swords and the Devil by Mike Bagwell (30 West Publishing House, 2026) [chapbook] Here’s what I wrote, blurbing, sincerely: “Reading Bagwell’s Poem of Thanks feels like listening to a guitar with strings of steel and smoke. The notes bend, the floor drops out. Each poetic swerve searches—‘bright snarls of gold and red light caught’—for an arrangement that meets this polycrisis in a way that feels intuitively right. Firm daily fact converses with blazing, mythic symbol. Praise tangles with the horror of this moment. Step into this branched and glowing consciousness.” +++++++++++ ++++++ + + + + + + + + + + + + In order to read poetry again—to really read it, which is, for me, to be immersed in it multiple times a day, something that helps maintain the habit of attention that allows me to connect with the poem, I started putting chapbooks on a book stand on the toilet tank. The Stay Behind by Serena Solin (Beautiful Days Press, Brooklyn, NY 2023) [chapbook] was one of the first I read in this mode. “But besides the vague arachnid shadow, most everyone is able to shrug it off by noon”; the poems feel meticulous and strange. I was happy to climb back up the stairs of their slides. <><<>><<<>><>>><>< ><>< >< >< >< >< >< >< >< ><<<>>> < >< >< > < ><> <<. >< pleasureis amiracle by Bianca Rae Messinger (Nightboat 2025). I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Bianca read from this several times. I won’t ruin in with analysis. Just quotes: “each neighbor went to shovel that night’s sleet into piles warm as if humid. no cars anymore—since when no one can exactly remember, as a history time seemed to have moved past it.” “at some point in the centuries after stores become obsolete, the word was lost even, stores. it only remembers because morning collects magazines from before its happening.” Among the fascist’s withering fusillades, it can become even harder to imagine alternative orders, ones that aren’t all woo, and I’m v happy these dreamscapes are and recur. ********%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%8%*%*%*%*%*%*%* If by Ghazal Mosadeq (Tripwire Pamphlet #17, 2026) Blisteringly relevant as the settler imperial Axis prepares for more war with Iran. A poem that in just it’s opening lines peels back layers of colonial history that resonate with the present, the shattered glass of the Golestan palace, another cultural treasure the settler axis has tried to destroy: “If the Bab-ey Homayoun and the Golestan palace existed / but you knew Reza Shah was nothing / less than a land-grabbing pig / nothing more / than an illiterate Cossak Iranian / on the payroll of the occupiers.” The poem continues in the conditional mode through historical destruction and displacement and personal anguish and moments of grace (“and if the smoke hovered over you / like a caring mother / and if you could see colours in the smoke”). It’s all in the air. The poem is hitting all the tense strings of this moment where a tyrant plays with threats of war like a toy, as U.S.-Israel flood East Asia with the instruments of death, as Iran continues to resist imperial domination, as Westoids still struggle to throw off their condescending humanitarian/liberal imperialist attitudes, preventing them from moving to action to prevent further settler axis atrocities. Anyway, a political poem is artful by being right on time. This poem is on time. Tripwire is on time. Ghazal Mosadeq writes: “There is a canary in this poem. It belonged to the last poet laureate of Tehran, Mohammed-Taqi Bahar. Mohammad-Taqi Bahar Street, in central Tehran, has also been hit. He did have a canary. This canary moves back and forth. Not through places. Through time. The poem takes place between 1906-1911 (the years of the Constitutional Revolution) and 1953, the year of the American-British coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosadeq. I only share a last name with him. Yet I feel as if we are related by blood” (39). The Wasted Land by Cait O’Kane (Tripwire Pamphlet #14, 2025) A poem beneath a black and white picture of rippling bricks in a wall next to a graffitied drainpipe: “vast holding facilities / biometric enclosures / starved cities, citations, / shit veins, lice, DEA lists, / rent flesh, rats & filth / caps & vials, hostile forces, / finite love, shot hope, / scrambled, cooked to sludge.” Punk as fuck, bleak as fuck. The poems are a concrete horizon ruthlessly patrolled. What makes them bearable is the raw human ache. In their brutal clarity I somehow think of Kaia Sand using a sledge hammer to inscribe FBI files onto metal plates. O’Kane on the piece: “This piece alludes throughout to T.S. Eliot’s epic poem “The Wasteland” in both form & content. It concerns my familial home of Kensington, Philadelphia, & its transition from working-class neighborhood to dope-slum-turned-development-project under eternal Police occupation.” The rear cover reads “::eugenics:: :: enclosure:: :: siege::” ‘Siege’ puts this in the frame of class war, the form of it being waged, the texture it describes as reducing social reproduction to 0, scorching the social terrain to prepare for development. Damn, I want to read more. !*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!* The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Balaño (composed 1984, published Posthumously) Reads like a shaggy warm-up to The Savage Detectives filled with great lines but whose scenes never quite crystallize (as well) its themes minus the interspersed letters from the apartment-bound Jan to aging U.S. sci-fi writers. I would have read much more about the potato university/anti-fascist guerilla campaign. “They were all poets, they all drank, they were all older than me. It wasn’t much fun, but I never missed a Saturday.” “So do you think that we have any hope of writing good science fiction? Will your committee, God bless it, award grants—Hugo grants, Nebula grants—to the Third World natives who do the best job describing robots?” (#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#)(#)()#) Analog: Science Fact, Science Fiction (February 1965) Picked up on a whim at a freaky used bookstore in Peekskill on the Hudson River to get a taste of the more straight-laced mainstream sci-fi of the 60s, the sci-fi in which a technically minded space-science guy / technician of empire was often the main character (this was a Conde Naste publication after all). Some interesting wrinkles here. )( () )( The Laurel Vol. 127 (Spring 2026, St. Bonaventure University). Student lit mag. The oldest continually published one. —– # ______ # ——- # ______ # NEARLY FAR NEARLY NOW by Kelly Clare (sendme press, nd) [Broadside 9/100, orange type of yellow paper] @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ The Book of Marys and Glaciers by Carrie Olivia Adams (Tupelo, 2026). “We came to this village alone but surveilled by a drone of the angels. The data collection center of the divine mining us. Blockchaining us to an NFT token of an idol, an icon framed in gold. That halo is a ring light.” One upside to my bruising travel schedule and the way it fragments time and strands me in hotel lobbies and airports is that I’m reaching to poetry more often. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% “Five” by Bob Kaufman [mimeograph reproduction]. Picked up at a Bob Kaufman panel in response to which some people had extreme feelings, apparently. !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ Moony Days of Being by Nathan Hoks (Black Ocean Press, 2026) Strange, funhouse poems from the elastic castle of middle age. I forget who described whose poems as dancing over the abyss. Well, sometimes, the line breaks here skid over that abyss the slide back to the kitchen with a wink. The book seems built to bring us to “Poem for Wendy’s Eyes,” into a moment where the whole idea of possibility in the world is annihilated and reborn in every blink of the beloved. I know reviewers are supposed to maintain some kind of equipoise. What if they don’t? I liked that last section break: !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ !/!\!/!\ Television Fathers by Sylvia Jones (Meekling Press, 2024) The speed and itineraries of economic need here: “Again, Informal, fliud, me moving early on / Between lots of hustles. / the hair salon to the barbecue shop to the / bust stop, to get to the ‘now hiring’ sign, living // in that suburban windows / restaurant, again / that idea of network, of merchants // hustling.” From “BAMBOOZLED #1”. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||| |||||||||| ||||||||||| |||||||| Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza by Wasim Said (1804 Books, October, 2025) Said writes his lived experience of the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in a series of short vignettes. He writes with unsparing detail, providing an on-the-ground view of many massacres we have received filtered and often distorted through the Western media or which we receive in merely images and not how these rending moments fit within the larger story of a young man and his family surviving barbaric assault after assault. But this isn’t the only note in the book. Mousa Alsadah’s forward: “Genocide, as a concept, is not merely mass killing. It is a systematic colonial process aiming to dismantle the colonized society, its material structures, institutions, and self-organization. But at its deepest level, it aims to destroy the moral structure of that society, to fracture it into scattered individuals, each preying on the other to survive. / And here arises this testimony—not only as a daily record of generosity, selflessness, truth, and cooperation, but as proof, in itself, of an astonishing resilience in the moral structure of this community under genocide.” Said reports on those acts of generosity, selflessness, truth and cooperation. He also reflects on what stories need to be told to maintain this moral structure in subtle ways. Here he describes a conversation with his friend Mousa, who had survived a flour massacre. Mousa: “ ‘The hungry people ran towards him, not to save him, but to snatch the sack of flour from his hands.’ / Astonished, I asked, ‘People from Gaza did that?!’ / Mousa covered his face with his hands. ‘Be quiet, Wasim. Be quiet! Hunger is bad, Wasim. When you have children crying from hunger right in front of you, you will do whatever you can so that they can eat.’” It’s a layered book. In the group I read this with, one woman who had only been learning about the genocide from wildly partial sources like The New York Times started the conversation by saying that what she read was so extreme, so disturbing, it couldn’t be real. After the conversation, she bought a Keffiyeh, put it on, and walked out into the world where that will make some of the worst people apoplectic. It’s a startling, profound book, one that has and will shake people into action. Action on a multitude of levels. And in a just future, the one we make, it will be one that we’ve all read, reflected on. Wasim Said remains in Gaza and has launched a collective fundraiser in tandem with the book. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^.^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^.^^^^^^. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill (Monthly Review Press, 2025) Both an exhaustively researched history of the Western theory industry and the development of a method for analyzing the production of ideology. Among other things, Rockhill traces the U.S.’s cultivation of an anti-communist version Marxism, a key component of a left compatible with incessant U.S. imperialist violence, that has slowly and steadily become the water in which we swim. The book, has apparently, kicked off a minor shit storm. Credibly accusing Adorno of making decisions that led to Walter Benjamin’s death will do that. Rockhill’s attempt to analyze the production of ideology is also timely as the media landscape transforms, as legacy media loses both credibility (for peddling genocide) and relevance, as the production and dissemination of news gets scrambled by the strange (and somewhat incestuous) assemblages of social media platforms, LLMs, states, and political actors, we’re going to need ways to conceptualize what’s happening and how to act meaningfully within this state of affairs. ————————-$$$$$$_——————— Speaking of: Our Problematic Fave: Public libraries & private equity: A closer look at the Libby app [Zine] +++$+$+++++$++$+$+$+$+$+$+$+$+++$+$+$+$+$+$+ With much regret, I’m out of gas so speed round: The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda (City Lights Books, 2024). Stars Songs of an Old Primate by James Tiptree Jr. (Ballantine Books, 1978). False Spring by Amie Zimmerman (Roof Books, 2026). Yes to this. Yes again. Again. “When I say I hate cops I mean I hate cops. / To mutter this means nothing. / To write a poem or a paper changes / little—I am not fooled.” ^^^^^^^ ^^^^^ vvvvvvvvvvv^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^v^v^V^V Re:Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta by Doris Lessing (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) I’ve made a life loving relatively impenetrable texts. I do not love this relatively impenetrable text.
JOE HALL 