Anthem Speed

"Anthem Speed, Christopher Bolin's third collection with Kuhl House Poets, affirms Bolin's emergence as a singular stylist in 21st century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic and visionary, Bolin's poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: "among/ the disinformation of the distress feeds," Bolin writes, "a pilot hears his coordinates/ being called by other planes." Hypnotically lyrical, unfolding as a series of languorous, cascading fragments of song, Anthem Speed evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations, though, are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Anthem Speed tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms and mountainsides, and envisions-with animal acuity-a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths. Surveying a field in which the sacred has been commodified, Bolin's work moves towards re-enchantment, a poetry that preserves and aims to renew possibilities for humane action, and for humility. Anthem Speed scaffolds new ways of thinking, acting, and hungering, and invites us to imagine that "the mind was the seventh summer of an unfound planet; until the mind was the fruit dusted by antlered collisions, below.""--