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.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Graeme Bezanson

Graeme Bezanson lives in Nova Scotia. Ultra Blue is his first book.

 

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook was a weird little e-book called Eclogues from H_NGM_N Books in Buffalo (free to download here). At the time I was thinking a lot about what astronauts mean. I’m not sure it changed my life a ton! But it was great to feel like I was participating in something bigger than just me. Poetry is pretty solitary work so it’s nice to do something a little more public every now and then.

Ultra Blue is my first full-length book. I’m still trying to figure things out by writing. Although it’s as fragmented and collage-y as my previous work, this book is probably my most straightforward stuff so far. It feels intensely earnest to me, to a kind of uncomfortable degree.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I grew up in Halifax listening to CKDU, Dalhousie University’s campus radio station. They played all kinds of eclectic stuff—I remember making tapes of Jim Carroll reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and listening to them over and over on my walkman at night. I still can’t fall asleep without some kind of talking in my ear. Around the same time, my older sister won a junior high English prize and was awarded a squat little paperback anthology called Immortal Poems of the English Language. I remember reading the line “After the first death there is no other” from a Dylan Thomas poem in there and not knowing what it meant but just being super impressed that in poems you could just say cool-sounding stuff like that.

 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It usually takes me a long time to get going! I tend to have a long phase of accumulating bits and pieces, fragments and phrases. Then I have to spend time figuring out how the different parts might fit together. The last part, actually making a poem, comes quicker.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Both! Sometimes from the ground up, sometimes from the top down. From the very beginning, the stuff in Ultra Blue was always going to make up one big project, or maybe two medium-sized projects that ended up coming together into one book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings feel like a separate thing. It’s nice to connect with friends, meet people, hang out together. But it’s not really part of the creative process for me, other than how the prospect of a reading causes you to kind of take stock of what you have, what’s finished, what goes together etc.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Well I’m interested in fragmentation and openness, in intertextuality, in how poetry emerges from other texts and discourses, how meanings build upon themselves. I like gathering bits and pieces of things and seeing how they might fit together. I like working with language as a kind of technology for thinking and for carrying meaning across contexts. I believe language is slippery and full of connotation and cultural baggage. Am I trying to answer questions? I feel more like I’m trying to describe questions, or restate them in new ways. I’m not sure what the big questions should be right now, probably something about how there’s this vast repository of all of human knowledge that is accessible at all times by people, corporations, governments, zombie algorithms. For instance I feel like poems should not pretend that the internet doesn’t exist.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Different roles for different writers! I think it’s important for someone to be paying close attention to language, to how it’s doing what it’s doing and saying what it’s saying. This is one thing writers can do.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It’s ok! I have to really believe in the editor. Luckily, for Ultra Blue I worked with Kevin Connolly, who is great, and the poems are better for it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Sister Corita Kent said that the only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. (All her rules are excellent advice for artists of all kinds.) In terms of direct counsel, my Grade 7 sewing teacher taught me that the first rule of stain removal is to do something right away. This is valuable advice that I have carried always. (Thanks, Mrs. Weber.)

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Last summer, I moved with my young family from France to Nova Scotia, so it’s been a year of upheaval and disrupted routines. Reading is probably the most important part of writing for me, and I’m usually able to keep that part going. I’m driving a lot at the moment to get to and from work, so I’m getting through a lot of audiobooks. I’m still working on a good system for safely taking notes while driving—speech-to-text is a little rough, it’s hard to highlight good parts of books to go back to, and so on. But generally the poem-writing routine is to go through the week accumulating fragments, little ideas or phrases here and there, and then whenever I have time, sitting down to try to shape those notes into poems.

When I’m writing fiction, it’s more momentum-based. I write a little bit every day, trying to turn off the critical part of my brain that wants very badly to tell me that the writing I’m doing is no good. Instead I try to focus on just moving forward. I find it helpful to call the files I’m working on things like “Dumb ideas for the part when A does B” or “Bad version of conversation between X and Y” which is silly but does in fact relieve some pressure and lets me write a little more freely. I try not to worry about the quality of writing until I get to the end of whatever fiction thing I’m writing, then I go back and try to make it good.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Books! New books or old books. Sometimes in my writing I get to a place where I convince myself that the secret to the only way forward is contained in some specific book that I have not yet read, which is a bit of a trap because a lot of the time the book turns out to be not quite what you imagined. Sometimes the book does give you a great idea and everything is cleared up right away, the path forward is revealed. And sometimes you have to go looking through more books. But always there’s someone who has thought about the same ideas you’re thinking about, or has struggled through similar struggles, or has managed to phrase things in a specific way that causes something to click. This is the great magic of books.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I lived in NYC for a long time and remember the smell of wild mint on the Highline. Then when I moved to France I mowed over a patch of wild mint and it was the same smell all over again. It’s nice to think that we can plant wild mint wherever we end up. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Films, music, art. Science as well, I guess: I wrote a novel about relativity but it turned out not great (you can read some of the better parts here). Actually maybe the main thing I take from science is the idea of work building on work. My dad was a microbiologist and sometimes I look up his old papers and the citations to his work from scientists who followed. I try to build on what writers have done before me, though I’m not sure that poetry advances in the same way as our understanding of stomach bacteria. But it’s nice to feel part of a long chain.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

So many! Recently there’s been Susan Howe, Lisa Robertson, CAConrad, Mark Bibbins, Tomaž Šalamun, César Aira, John Thompson, Elizabeth Bishop, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Uhh I guess homeownership?

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

In another life I think I’d have liked to be a saltmaker, like the sauniers of Île de Ré. Once I tried to make salt in New York, lugging a bucket of Coney Island seawater home on the subway. Then I boiled it off on the stove. It made the whole building smell bad and the salt tasted metallic and awful. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Fame, fortune, etc.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Probably the last really great book I read was Debths by Susan Howe, which for me was one those books that make you go “Oh right, this is why I love poetry.” CAConrad’s Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return  is another great one I read recently. In the car, I just finished listening to Accordion Crimes, and Annie Proulx is becoming one of my favourite novelists. I also just finished the Margaret Atwood memoir, which was pretty good if you’re interested in Margaret Atwood lore. Her family had a cottage a couple cottages down from my grandparents, perched on a cliff over the Bay of Fundy. Also there’s a lot of House of Anansi tea in there!

For movies, most of what I’ve seen in recent years has been at the Cannes film festival—I worked there the past couple of years and would just go to anything that happened to fall in gaps in my schedule. A good one from last year is the documentary about Shia LaBeouf’s disastrous community theater experiment called Slauson Rec. It’s a tough, compelling watch! He comes off as such a simultaneously charismatic and charming but manipulative and violent figure. Like I can’t believe he let the documentary happen. I’m not sure if it has found North American distribution yet, but I hope it does.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Ultra Blue is a very fathers/sons-coded book, and my daughter has negotiated that the next long project will be more up her alley. She has requested a novel involving caverns and peril, so that’s the main thing happening now.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

 

as if an etymology my love

the word still means threshold.
I am standing at your—
I place my feet and body on—
the place where I can come
or I can go—threshold
meant a raised ledge to stop
the hay that covered a floor
from spilling out and scattering
each time someone opened
the door. hold the thresh inside,
my love. when we bed down,
let us bed down on this haysoft
floor. think of it—a syllable
is a threshold to a word—
just as a windowsill—just as
a door—love is one syllable—
sleep, hope, dream, death, no,
yes, all, one—words are openings.
every word—some with many
ledges. I place my mind and body
at your—sweep around the doorsill
carefully—my love

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. “I’d thought that this would be a reflective time,” she writes, to open the poem “The Ticket,” “but parenting is a now-centered endeavor. / I may have to think about tomorrow, / but then again, I have to think about assuring tomorrow / will happen right now. / Yesterday is over. Yesterday things happened / that impact us now. / This part of my life is running in the present tense.” In poems reflective, unflinching and meditative, purposeful and empathetic, Dungy has achieved a remarkable collection around a particular moment of time, in that immediate, impossible and perpetual now.