This collection chronicles coming of age as a queer millennial in a twenty-first century America defined by the internet, climate crisis, and a growing disconnection that the poems within work to resist. Here, everyone and everything serves as a potential reflection for something larger than the poet can understand: an unknown debit card thief, the cartoon teacher Ms. Frizzle, The Weather Channel, an RV park, a dead poet. These poems seek to make something of the spaces between and reach toward a sense of the ecstatic just beyond. They are poems of imagination and vision that strive to look rather than look away, that attempt to capture a nebulous feeling before it is gone for good. Swan Hammer is an instructor’s guide to connection-making, of seeing and then seeing again, in ways that have been redefined in the age of the internet. Here is one poet’s wandering relationship to their own sense of what it is to be alive and queer at a time when there is so much on the brink of disappearing—and what a queer experience it is.
ContentsSelf-Portrait as HammerThe Poet Dreams of LevitationPi DayThe Ghost of Robert Frost VisitsRoller Derby Night in Southern IllinoisPoem for Whomever Hacked My Debit Card and Spent $150 at the Macy’s in Alexandria, VirginiaPoem for My Downstairs NeighborElegy for the Early 21st Century HipsterDear Los AngelesI remember Nashville, the dueling piano bariContact / ScreensTomato PrayerSeasonalGetting Lost in Gary, IndianaDay 1, December 22, 2012MargaretGenesis, Suburbiales(bi)anWindow Seat Arithmeticclavicle sympathy painsWhy I Shouldn’t Be an FBI Special Agentinfinity tunnel: haikuMarbleSelf-Portrait as a Jack-o’-LanternWould You Rather SonnetRV NationOde to The Weather ChannelSelf-Portrait as Loan PaymentOde to Graph Paper, or Questions for the CardinalSpecialization: Early 2000sHouse RulesGlendaloughPoem Wearing a Party HatThe Sweatshirt, 2005Elegy for Seth Cohen from The O.C.Four Poets, a Bicycle, and a Walk through an Empty Parking Lotmoonkite: haikuCognitive FunctionMoonrise RitualPoem Ending with Fantasy of Building a BonfireAt the Twilight of the Big BangThe Crickets RememberPoem for Ms. Frizzletree huggerEmbodiedswan hammerAcknowledgments
