Joe Hall, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit

 

That Self That Will Not Leave

Though I want to switch off the displacement machine,
it warms and begins to hum as I want to warm
and hum in the grass in the city that becomes my life,
my end, daydreaming hand tools through which I can extend
torn tendons, to lever a mouth into the earth that will speak
pole beans and wandering vines and how one must not
own anything absolutely, how there are deities
below to almost name and there is water in the stone
like blood in an eye, beside the marker. I want
to heal, I want to become a winged worm
held by a concrete sky, hidden
from developers whelping cubes
into humid boxes. I want to believe
that what saves us is not a ski slope in a skyscraper
that holds the desert sun in its jewel-like eye.
I want the bus to show up, why can’t
the bus show up? And why give a cop
flowers when a cop could blow
a ragged wound of stemmy asters, swelling
mushrooms, and ocean-abstracted zip ties
through his head? I want to switch off
that warm hum, watch the heat fade
into a burnt orange swatch in this black room,
to give my mouth to the night, pale moth
pulse on a black oak trunk wider than a planet
like an onyx ring around a pale sun.
Give that planet to the night,
rest my back against its radiant ribs
to listen to the city, to Buffalo’s night
how it labors and gasps.

The latest in what appears to be an almost insistent exploration of Buffalo, New York from the ground, from the people, is Buffalo poet and critic Joe Hall’s Buffalo Free Rapid Transit (Boston MA/Chicago IL: Black Ocean, 2026), a collection that follows Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean, 2010), The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean, 2013), Someone’s Utopia (Black Ocean, 2018) and Fugue and Strike: Poems by Joe Hall (Black Ocean, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Organized in seven cluster-sections—“RIVERS,” “SNOW,” “SOUTH BOUND DAY DREAM,” “WE MUST TAKE A BREAK FROM ALL THIS RAMBLING & RETURN OUR ATTENTION TO THAT MATTER OF $,” “Fuck them Trees,” “ONE WITH DESPAIR” and “SMOKE”—there is a curious way that Hall explores and examines his geographic and cultural space, amid conversations around what a city is or should be, could be, and the boundaries of that particular locus. Set firmly in working-class roots and conversation, Joe Hall’s “Buffalo” seems related both to how Philadelphia poets ryan eckes [see my review of his latest] and Gina Myers [see my review of herlatest] not only speak of class and work and their particular city, but just as much to Charles Olson’s sense of “Gloucester,” examining both from a class perspective of labour and a general sense of place, culture and shared localized identity. “Back to work and at last / the fireballs explode into gore,” begins the poem “Fireballs 5: OSHA Tour of the Application Factory,” “at last my fingers fit / again around the cube / of cardboard, at last / a customer is explaining / how smart they are / while they jam their card / into my mouth [.]”

Through a myriad of first-person poems, Hall offers an accumulation of narrative overlays, seeking the shape and contours of this particular portrait of Buffalo. As part of the notes at the end of the collection, he offers: “In addition to the particulars of my biography and imagination of what the city of Buffalo could be, these poems are informed by small and large disasters Buffalo faced in these years: The 2022 Tops Massacre, the 2022 Buffalo Blizzard, the police violence of the 2020 uprisings as epitomized by the police attack on the elderly Martin Gugino, and the atmospheric pollution of the 2023 Canadian Wildfires. The people of Buffalo continue to face down the systemic forces that produced these disasters.” What is interesting, well beyond elements of comparison to works by eckes, Myers or Olson, what Hall is describing is a poetry of inherent witness, attempting not simply to articulate, but to acknowledge and document, much in the way of his prior collection, including the extended poem-section “GARBAGE STRIKE,” which quite literally collaged the details of a strike across his city through the first half of 2019. This is a lyric of resistance from a perspective of working-class ethos and values, with lines held at the ground level, articulating a city through the people that actually do the labour required in such complex and communal spaces.

University-Owned Blocks

He is changing his shirt in the humid bathroom stall, the door slung open, I look away and when I look back he’s on his hands and knees scraping a putty knife across the floor “I hate sticky things,” he says, slides the putty knife into a small pocket, picks up a poly bag distended with his possessions and wanders out, into Buffalo.