Fear of Description

Book excerpt: These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-) employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet's future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a dark joke? Can it be both? Ranging between elegiac lyrics and autobiographical accounts of a group of poets moving from Iowa to Brooklyn in the years just before and after the 2016 election, Fear of Description reinvigorates the prose poem, exploring the slippery terrain between grief and friendship, artifice and technology, writing and ritual, hauntings and obsessions - searching for joy in art but instead finding it in pitch darkness. As the narrative cuts back and forth in time and circles around itself, the stories which begin to emerge in this remarkable book - of dead dogs speaking through Ouija boards, lives cut short, and youthful brilliance - explore at once the struggle to find one's place in the world, and the fear of being trapped once there.