Spider Cone

A.L. Nielsen's new volume of poetry resonates with the sounds of new and familiar themes, bridging uncertain times with constantly renewed hopes in poetic language.-- Jean-Philippe Marcoux.

The quirky and witty imagination at work in these poems brings to light a linguistic world full of the delightful turns of day-to-day speech, structured within a poetics that foregrounds the phrase as a unit of measure and syntactical syncopation as a measure of rhythm. A.L. Nielsen's verse operates across a range of cultural, musical, and social reference-- sometimes within a single poem--that is often astonishing. At a time when work that explores the nexus of the personal, the sociopolitical, and the cultural sometimes results in dour, moralistic self-righteousness and virtue testing, it's delightful to read poetry like Nielsen's, which is at once keyed to the peculiarities of our time while being so much fun to read.--Geoffrey Jacques

Poetry. Music.