American Experiment (Volume 42)

Aaron Baker is the author of two award-winning collections of poems: Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin), which won both the Katherine Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and Posthumous Noon (Gunpowder Press), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. He teaches in the creative writing program at Loyola University Chicago.

"Who doesn't want a big book now and then? American Experiment is a big book. And it arrives as if in response to a desperate situation—it arrives as we Americans are losing our sense of who we are, and who we have aspired to be. American Experiment is a poem that recognizes the great difficulty of making a long poem (a nation) out of lyric inclinations (rugged individualism; the independence of each state), and it succeeds because it embraces that difficulty—it remembers the trick that Americans seem to have forgotten, the trick of making many voices saying many things, even contradictory things, speak toward an ultimate unity." —Shane McCrae"Who but the ghost of Walt Whitman could lead this American Dante as he travels across 'the greatest poem,' through a bardo of American history, encountering a host of American icons and artistic forebears from Johnny Appleseed to Geeshie Wiley, from Emily Dickinson to Alice Austen? Spurred by Thomas Paine's injunction that 'Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,' the poet confronts an America that is once again divided, when 'What we need's/ Not another flourish or idea,/ But one, even one, adequate description.' As he navigates a time-warping topography, where 'Simultaneous visions of wagons and cargo-jets,/ Pack mules and semi-trucks labor, strain in harness/ For the sky,' Baker's poet reanimates pivotal inflection points from the Revolutionary War, to the Alamo, to the Great Chicago Fire, to the Covid pandemic. This is no epic, aiming to assert a unifying national identity, but a poem that works to unravel the American mythos—as if to unearth American tyranny at its root, as if to honor the agency of earth itself. If the poet envies Robinson Jeffers how he worked 'in the old way with the good/ Materials of language and stone,' in American Experiment Baker has forged a new American poetics—algorithmic, ecological, and astonishing." —Katy Didden