Chris Nealon – författare

The five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that's both teeming and fluid.

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 – ”

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 – ”