Or maybe some people just have bad stars
and so spiral out of themselves,
path of an arm within an arm—
cases of multiple identities
souls shaken until a one falls out, unfolds like an ink blot
or else they come apart
like the cording around the edge of a mattress.
Drive-thru tellers; the decline of pneumatic tubes.
Hubble points other-worldward. A dimmer switch for the chandelier.
There's a great and wild simultaneity in Nathaniel Farrell's Lost Horizon.
Danielle Dutton
Taking as a point of departure the retail utopia of the American mallscape — a composite of town square, garden, and space station — Lost Horizon spirals out through interstate and rail to touch national parks, local attractions, truck stops, big box stores, strip malls, tattoo parlors, oil rigs, flower shops, and baggage claims. Throughout the incessant movement of the book-length poem, unbroken by stanzas or sections, Farrell privileges observation over judgment and seeks out the crossroads between cultural, myth, and brand image. The poem speaks from between the mall fountain and the wishing well, the Disney princess and Spenserian queen, the noble hero and the voyeur. Lost Horizon is a poem that catalogs and indexes the collision between fantasies of high and low.
Nathaniel Farrell was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of Newcomer (UDP) — a personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign — and Lost Horizon (forthcoming, UDP), a long poem inspired by the American mall, interstate landscapes and suburban pastorals. He teaches composition at Washington University in St. Louis and hosts a weekly experimental music program on 88.1 KDHX, St. Louis’ community-supported, freeform radio station. Farrell’s poetry has been published in 6×6, New York Nights, Greetings Magazine, VLAK, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Recluse. His collages have been exhibited at Bushel (Delhi, NY), and Some Other Ways — his collaborative poetic project with Jessica Baran on the first month of Trump’s presidency — was part of the World Chess Hall of Fame’s Imagery of Chess exhibition.
This is remarkable poetry by Nathaniel Farrell. Never have I been more mindful of a book's title, falling into flesh, the enduring consumption, consumed by the avalanche of the known world, the horizon seemingly in sight, then lost in the addictive travel with things, completely lost, where are we going, let's go, feeling familiar in the surrounding topography, at home even, but lost, as promised by the poet.
CAConrad
There's a great and wild simultaneity in Nathaniel Farrell's Lost Horizon. At once the tide pulls back, a phone lights up, a plastic plant sways in the mall. Way out there is Mars, and right here is a food court, and down below an octopus "fondles the ocean floor." It's vertiginous, how much we (don't) know. We just keep shopping, we throw a parade, we just keep parking our cars. Meanwhile, "the confluence presses down on the heart of the continent." But this book-of-wonder reminds us that we haven't always been here and we aren't ever alone. I kept thinking of that line from Simone Weil: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Lost Horizon is a beautifully generous book.
Danielle Dutton
Other UDP titles by Nathaniel Farrell here
Nathaniel Farrell interviewed on WYBCX Yale Radio
An excerpt from Lost Horizon in The Brooklyn Rail
Nathaniel Farrell’s Newcomer Reviewed in Warscapes
Nathaniel Farrell Interviewed on KDHX
Online archive of Nathaniel Farrell’s KDHX radio show, Cure for Pain
ISBN: 978-1-946433-25-1
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 96 pp, 5.75 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: June 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK)