Details
Fractured and wandering, Two Bolts explores the experience of Black diaspora as a circulatory process. Bodies move toward and away from history, myth, and various “imagined communities,” to borrow the term from Benedict Anderson. These poems swing between continents and times in fragmented couplets that lyrically craft a cosmology out of pieces. The speaker finds and loses multiple selves in the breaks and enjambments of Black life as Broaddus experiences it. Together, the poems sound the weird currents of place and belonging.
Author
Matt Broaddus
Matt Broaddus is a poet and Associate Poetry Editor at Okay Donkey Press. He is the author of the chapbook Space Station (Letter [r] Press). His poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, PANK, Fence, Foundry, and The Offing. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation as well as a residency from the Millay Colony for the Arts and a scholarship from the Community of Writers. He lives in Colorado and works at a public library.
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Excerpt
Delivery As in heaven. As in temporary detention facility. The whitecap devils appear without warning. Porcupine quill jackets. For a small bribe these heads can be taxidermied. I am only a visitor. Tasting metal and led around discord street for a tongue that works. A green plus sign. A sympathetic apothecary. In caves silent as lightning. Why do you pace? Why chew fingers in the parking lot? You will wake the voluminous one. The one who rises without warning. As the horizon. As the daily sea conveys the faithful boats along its little blue belt.