Defining what Gabriel Palacios terms the 鈥渧aporpoem,鈥 Lunar Hilton Elegy moves through the artifacts of a boyhood suspended in the neon-noir dusk of 1989鈥攈ome-taped Video Soul broadcasts, dead-mall architecture, late-night cable access鈥攖reating the past not as a home to return to, but as an improvised shelter against the present鈥檚 digital weather.
Lunar Hilton Elegy asks what remains of the American myth when its 鈥渇reshly planted tracts鈥 resolve into blue photonic mist. At once darkly comic and urgently elegiac, Palacios offers a report from the threshold of the still-buffering all-at-once鈥攐r, more precisely, a lost-and-found sunbaked cassette of that report, still playing.
This collection is in conversation with the soundpoem project, Spanish Trail Motel. You can listen
鈥淭he most surprising aspect of Lunar Hilton Elegy is that it isn鈥檛 so much an elegy to a lost world as a mesmeric topology of the world we presently inhabit鈥攁n eroded agriscape pitted with debt, where shelter is approximated by bombed-out, de-realized Red Roof Inns and Airbnbs thick with half-mutant Pomeranians. Like a notebook disintegrating in a glyphosate rain, these poems are remarkable for their gentle unwirings and startling preservations, for the intimacies and recognitions Palacios鈥檚 speaker attends with his human, de-weaponized eye.鈥濃擩oyelle McSweeney, author, Death Styles
鈥淲ith a gnarled syntax that shines more lucidly with each reread, Palacios delivers one stunning poem after another, and each will worm its way into your subconscious. In mine, forever lives a bleached caterpillar that I found in a parking lot I鈥檝e never been to, where performativity might be properly mourned. This is one of the best collections of poetry I鈥檝e read in the past decade. Put down the remote you鈥檝e been using to try and steer that TVship, because the set has been languishing in the dump all this time. Tune into Palacios鈥檚 songs instead.鈥濃擲ara Sams, author, Atom City
