Somewhere Anyhow
Abstract
The poems in the collection are deeply interested in masculinity’s relationship with emotion, as they, the poems, move nostalgically across the USA and it’s social, temporal, and spatial conditions. The poems handle grief, jealousy, joy, sadness, loss, romantic love, sex, confusion, confidence, and the gamut while maintaining a tone that is both self-aware and distant.
By omitting punctuation, the pressure on each phrase, line, and syntactical unit becomes a complex space. The units of sound become spaces that strengthen the tonal awareness, while the uneasiness of reading syntactical units without punctuation creates some emotional distance that is intended to avoid sentimental rambling in the same space that nostalgia occupies.
To state all that more simply, I wanted to create a book of poetry that says more than it states. I want the poems to stand alone as works that inspire nostalgic thinking while also standing on one another’s shoulders to amass a Voltron of experience that spans a continent’s width over two decades and three American presidents.