Anthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin鈥檚 emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin鈥檚 poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: 鈥渁mong / the disinformation of the distress feeds,鈥 Bolin writes, 鈥渁 pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.鈥
This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions鈥攚ith animal acuity鈥攁 world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.
鈥淲hat won鈥檛 a 鈥榮aint with a shovel鈥 unearth in these exquisite, disquieting, soul-trawling poems that variously mine, measure, tally, sample, body-scan, and heat-capture our bereaved universe? Anthem Speed drops us here in the ruins mid-song, in wonder and sorrow, dappled 鈥榠n forensic light,鈥 holding on to Bolin鈥檚 dire music for dear life.鈥濃擱obyn Schiff, author, A Woman of Property
鈥淲ith a jade eye, but never a jaded one, Christopher Bolin offers us our contemporary condition鈥檚 鈥榗hanging symbols / in forensic light.鈥 Here the world is an ongoing apocalypse, where 鈥榯he uranium thinning quail鈥檚 eggs鈥 hint at a wider irradiation, where 鈥榖irds鈥 bodies smell of smoke,鈥 and the images chatter their jagged clarities through the Geiger counter鈥檚 static, and the logic of the lyric poem suffers such mutation that one line鈥檚 leap to the next can feel like a gnostic juxtaposition. Search engine bots vie with capital鈥檚 half-life to claim the human heart鈥檚 worried worth, and the security state sings to the link satellites that surveil us. And yet a strange hope runs its electric current through these lines: not that all is not lost, but that the very evidences of our vast dismantling can be rebuilt into another structure, ones that witness the world even if it cannot heal it, while quietly suggesting that a meaningful life still exists, and these poems are our path to it.鈥濃擠an Beachy-Quick, author, Arrows
