Here, Too

Jennifer Nelson

BROADSIDE  | $20

February 2016
Read an excerpt

Here, Too

Here too many things stand in relation,
and every human thing retreats.
Empire is the only form of preservation.

Liberals letterpress an invitation
to dance to Other people’s beats.
Here too many things stand in relation

to allow for any real vacation.
Everyone murders so everyone eats.
Empire is the only form of preservation

that polices its ritual predation
so the entrails explain the elites.
Here too many things stand in relation:

even empire’s own obliteration
fantasy plays the game and cheats.
Empire is only the form of preservation.

Imagine history without salvation.
A form obsessed with loss repeats.
Here, too, many things stand in relation.
Empire is the only form of preservation.

Everyone murders so everyone eats.

Jennifer Nelson

Designed and printed using lead type at UDP in a signed edition of 200 for a reading at The Poetry Project in Manhattan, NY on February, 29 2016.

About the Author

Jennifer Nelson is the author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (UDP); Civilization Makes Me Lonely, winner of the Sawtooth Prize (Ahsahta); and Harm Eden (UDP). Her work has appeared in Panda’s Friend, A Perfect Vacuum, Social Text, The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere; she was the Offen Poet at the University of Chicago in 2020. She is also assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Penn State University Press).

Publication Details

Print/Ephemera
8.25 x 11 in
Publication Date: February 29 2016
Distribution: Direct Only