The text contends that there is such a thing as public space, and that the poet can intervene in it. Moreover, it asserts that Buffalo—a poor, working-class city in the Rust Belt, crumbling from decades of neglect—is capable of ecstatic beauty.

There are no shoulds besides making marks on a page and arranging those words in a particular order; what’s left is a condition of the present, of taste which cannot exactly be spoken to before it changes.

do we live here — wedreamstories&scenesbutwedontlivethem (Notley) — or here — ppleatcronuts&frankoceanieatbusilybetweenyourlegs (Chang)

And maybe that brings us to the myth of chronology: linear time equals progression. No. There is no linear progression and we’re reproducing subjection again and again.

Writing histories of struggle alongside imagined futures of collective care, there is no isolated subject. Silt’s essays and poems serve as a sprawling manifesto, showcasing the peculiarities of pleasure under capitalism.

Consider this pamphlet a set of buyer’s notes, a thorough investigation under the orders of academizing burglars. The question you must then ask yourself is: is the nicest door a door one can buy, a door one must take, or a door one must build?

“An Elemental Rust,” says Dickinson. I grew it on the inside of a can. A rustling effect. A chandelier. A .22. Its cartridges. A bit of window screen patching a screen and a dried bee. A contact lens.

Rather than a rurality for tourists, a land recast as a bourgeois playground pervaded by natural and cultural heritage, Cain attempts a rurality that is grotesque and potent. He performs a pastoral contaminated by history.

In that pulse between orality and literacy, the history of thinking and breathing, something forced—to hurl. Somewhere someone is apologizing for existing.

Heard you pulled a twenty dollar bill out of an Ohio sunset. Heard you do it every night.

Graham’s poems do not merely describe images of the near future, Anthropocene industry and loss, but enact its immediacy with energetic bursts of syntax contending with their afterwards, their silence: “—& where // does it go now / when it goes away”

As long as you have things to say, you don’t have to package or repackage things in a very intellectual way. If the thought is forceful enough, it will find a way to convey itself, even if it’s in a broken language, even in broken English.

A US readership may be seeking the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views, a challenge that will change them, but these poems are after something different.

Sideline aside, talk just to say, speak just to hey, sound just to chorus. Take long sustain sounds, remove the attack & decay to assemble tones. Lower & raise pitch, make the levels consistent, string together a long-ass DRONE.

There is an insistence to the art required of this stillness, this refusal to act, and the attention to quotidian detail it both enables and depends upon.

I always wonder what it feels like
to be wrong

to have a pool
I want to do that again

I guess it is labeled as a story collection. So they’re all—for the sake of categorization—they’re short stories, but I don’t know. Some of them were published as prose poems, and I think that letting them both be categorized and also evasive of categorization is kind of cool.

foot
metre
colour
lojick

To be miraculous is not about having the best of luck.
To be miraculous is about having enough wealth to buy the fortune.
And you know what they say about money and poetry. But I fold the cranes.

you said you saw my finger twitch
saw me press my pelvis to the archive
but on the other hand you believe
that we awaken out of nothing