People across the world settle in extremes.Places where the ground is so hot you needdouble-layered leather-lined shoes, or whereif you get drunk enough, you’ll freeze to death.The best technology sent to Mars isn’t meant to return.An architect says there is not a single buildingthat will never collapse. He says, on earth bridgesare what last the longest holding ruin in the worlduntil there is supernova. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad thing.It’s not like I can change the channel anyhow.As an American, the camera is always on.I waste too much time trying to figure out how I look.The best trend is always a change or a return, settlinginto reruns and knowing what they’re not.But didn’t I realize that? Expansion isn’t limitless,and you can’t choose something into truth,like you can into concept.
(no subject)
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“(no subject)” from (no subject): by Peter Burghardt.
Published by Omnidawn in December, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Peter Burghardt.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Peter Burghardt is a Midwest-based writer and seller of vintage and collectible musical instruments. He co-founded speCt books in 2012, which he edits alongside Chris Philpot, Gillian Hamel, and Robert Andrew Perez. His work has appeared in various magazines and journals such as The Elephants, Tammy, The Offending Adam, Witness, The Laurel Review, and White Stag. He is the author of [no subject] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2022) and the chapbook Cosmic American Music (Old Gold, 2017).
The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal and the everyday. This collection draws inspiration from the idea of the quickly written subjectless email, as the poet would clear small periods of time to write and record observations and thoughts, then send it to himself in untitled emails. The book takes the shape of an impressionistic twenty-first-century diary, reflecting on themes of anxiety about the future and the situation of the present. As these moments compound, the line between the present, past, and future is blurred in the conflation of self and memory. Driven by a speaker who is hermetically sealed in their private world, these ostensibly subjectless poems derive their meaning through the tension between narrative and emotional resonances. Through moment-to-moment reflections, (no subject) digs deep in search of the big little feelings transmitted by fatherhood, the fusion of time and space, loneliness, resilience, and wonder.
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