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Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon's fifth book of poetry, All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it.
“You almost let your ego go,” he writes, “but oh—/maybe tomorrow.” Revolving through moments of sociability and passages of inwardness, the poet’s address shifts in these poems from “I” to “you” and back again, inviting his audience to shift along with him. Out of that agility, All About You builds a generous model of what it means to pay attention, and drafts a delicately post-pandemic “we”: “imagine what a healed people could do / Just flesh – full of chatter – / Hush now / Come on, let’s run – ”
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All About You is a celebratory, intimate study of a ”two-part person writing out of incompatible moods,” while “trying to imagine a remediated future” through digressive, dexterous, and enlightening poems.
Virginia Konchan, Harriet Books, Poetry FoundationWith a poetic line that tends to long, unbidden gestures (“The flung arm of a dancer”), the ripples of his mind engage with artful spontaneity on meaningful moments in his life: a father’s death, the landscapes of memory, the work of poetry, the childhood origins of a sensibility (“Launching a life of referring to singers by their first names—so gay!”)
David Woo, Lit Hub -
Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of (Wave Books, 2020), The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), as well as three books of literary criticism. He lives in Washington, DC.
Publication month: May 2024
ISBN# 9781950268955 (6.5x9, 96pp, paperback)
ISBN# 9798891060029 (6.5x9, 96pp, limited edition hardcover )
