Concealed Nations

Book excerpt: Poetry. In an agitated, elegiac, and personalized series of poetic propositions, Joel Felix in CONCEALED NATIONS, his follow up to LIMBS OF THE APPLE TREE NEVER DIE, engages questions of justice both racial and social, white survivalism and gun-rights communities, family life and loss, drone strikes and the Islamic State, lab testing, and lyric lineage and transcendence. Tyrone Williams, writing in Jacket2, called LIMBS a moving meditation on the impossibility and necessity of poetry, on history as 'enslavement without end, ' and the possibility, however unlikely, that there remains, its brutalities notwithstanding, a truth-telling residue in language. CONCEALED NATIONS presses that truth-telling towards oracle and curse, finding a voice of clarity and frustration to reflect the times. The page, writes Felix, is the glass I am trying to break.