Description
Poetry. Part historical fiction and part nature poem, NEWCOMER takes place in a wartime landscape estranged by nostalgia and American story-telling. A soldier passes through a landscape that is mutable, both familiar and foreign, while memories of home come in waves, receding and reappearing in images of crisp grass and in the sounds of wind. Military epic mixes with pastoral romance, and neither are resolved. Instead, NEWCOMER's investigation of entropic minutia suggests a very contemporary (perhaps post-traumatic) confusion of temporality, and by this turns our thoughts toward a phenomenology of historical imagination.
Author Bio
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 (Ugly Duckling Presse)—a personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign—and LOST HORIZON (Ugly Duckling Presse), 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 6x6, 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.
Author City: SAINT LOUIS, MO USA