Anthem Speed

Anthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin's emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first 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: &quote;among / the disinformation of the distress feeds,&quote; Bolin writes, &quote;a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.&quote;This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations 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, Bolin 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.