It’s really rare to be read capaciously, for one’s work to be presented with a thick sense of its context–and for the reader to make their own idiosyncratic constellations with parts of the work. While seeking something like the truth of the work, reviews should have the fingerprints of their reviewer all over it. At least that’s how I like to read them. Anyway, all the way back in September, Community Mausoleum published Alex Benedict’s essay/review of my 2023 book Fugue & Strike, and I’m finally finding the time to say how gratified I am for the deep attention and insight Benedict brought to it. & I learned a lot more about d.a. levy, Cleveland, and Meagan Day’s “Ode to Sanitation Workers.”
Now I want every review to be this attentive, to include history, biography, politics (and trash), for these to be at play but to not over-determine readings.
P.S.
Benedict is the publisher of receipt-tape books. You should probably check them out.
Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide Anthology Release
It’s here: Infrasonic Press’s Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide, a multimedia Palestine solidarity publication based drawing heavily from artists in Erie, PA and Buffalo, NY, w/all profits going to the Doctors Without Borders Emergency Relief Fund and the Palestine Youth Movement. Since the Lebanon Peace Deal, the entity’s attacks on Gaza have continued, starvation continues, the [worst thing] continues (you know this, right?). Heartening to see artists adapt their work to the circumstances. It can be a fraught process yeah, but linking our culture-making to material support is better than silence. Lv seeing friends, artists new to me, and activists from across the Rust Belt sharing this space–& foregrounding our own regional settler-colonial context. & being weird, & wild, & pungent, & thought provoking. I got a piece in there too. A lot of the material is free online – but you can purchase too, if you wanna redirect some of those culture $s or donate directly to these orgs. Free Palestine (should be common sense).
3 New Poems in The Dialogist
Snow healing the cracked blocks of Buffalo //// 3 new poems at The Dialogist //// (actually published awhile ago but getting to post in the post-semester hangover) //// Thx thx thx to eds. Angelo Mao & Timothy Ashley Leo //// OR My great love is walking around Buffalo, getting to know it cracked block by block its life, entropy and repair & then to think of my friends among this & see the yellow smudge of memory in the light: futures refracted into the cataclysmic & ordinary each an itinerary through the real & imaginary memory & expectation, as if the city could change in light of our being, could change in spite of the whorling, centripetal force of all the $ & dividing & organizing of the ruling class, a normal, slow rolling disaster & the make-do of everyone else, getting by, taking care thru it all: night classes, feeding strays, plotting gardens while on call. &, yeah, snow. This particular sequence is snow-flooded. I love the snow when it evens and levels and brings us out talking to each other over our shovels.
Entering the Dread: A Close Reading of “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed”
Sometimes a poem comes flap and claw out of you, weird child, sticky & burning. That’s how I felt about “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (published in Oversound 9) You hope that poem gets some kind of life, as it streaks out, gross and glittering, because it took with it half of some kidney-like, two-lobed organ that you didn’t know you had but now feel it’s partial, unsettling functioning. Metaphor–straining! But, you see, it’s the kind of thing I, as a writer, hope to look at again, through someone else’s eyes because it distends under my gaze.
Anyway, I’m grateful Kent Shaw took the time to give “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” a close read. It’s a poem whose mesh tries to hold several of my most painful years in returning to Buffalo and painful years for Buffalo and recreate an experience of time as recursive and piling w/o release. And Shaw does marvelous work examining its threads and working in a way that refuses to reductively thematize the poem. His series “Spectacular Poems” does a difficult thing. While many close-readings sterilize their subject, these seem to animate the readers’ own reading of the poem with possibility while also up while making some larger, thoughtful point about poetry.
The poem started with me walking around Buffalo (neoliberal rotted) during the pandemic. In continued with how each those walks overlaps and departs from the other, how our transits make the city as the city makes us. It’s a poem about ground and sky, our community garden and greens (I always wanted to get greens in a poem in homage to my early teacher, Lucille Clifton) and the climate-chaos intensified Canadian infernos of 2021 (I think?). It’s a poem of digging, harvesting, the subterranean—those waste spaces below elevated roadways, graffiti, the plants there doing their chemistry below burning fuel. & practice, smoldering discontent, love. It’s going to be the final poem in my forthcoming collection Buffalo Free Rapid Transit, a book about the city that is and could be.
This poem is also the last big thing I wrote before the g***n***c***d***–from a different world but not a discontinuous world. So, yeah, find your friends, hold on tight, & get ready to keep going hard for a different world.
JOE HALL 