Description
Poems derived from momentary reflections saved in the poet’s subjectless emails.
The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal and the everyday. This collection draws inspiration from the idea of the quickly written subjectless email, as the poet would clear small periods of time to write and record observations and thoughts, then send it to himself in untitled emails. The book takes the shape of an impressionistic twenty-first-century diary, reflecting on themes of anxiety about the future and the situation of the present. As these moments compound, the line between the present, past, and future is blurred in the conflation of self and memory. Driven by a speaker who is hermetically sealed in their private world, these ostensibly subjectless poems derive their meaning through the tension between narrative and emotional resonances. Through moment-to-moment reflections, (no subject) digs deep in search of the big little feelings transmitted by fatherhood, the fusion of time and space, loneliness, resilience, and wonder.
Peter Burghardt is a writer who spends his time in the Midwest and the San Francisco Bay area, and he cofounded and edits speCt books. His work has appeared in various magazines and journals, and he is the author of the chapbook Cosmic American Music.
"Great philosophical questions sometimes take the simplest forms. What one thinks of as 'ordinary' in a human’s life is anything but ordinary. Like the great poems of Michael Burkard or Ralph Angel, these poems of sound-alike Burhgardt spin from humble origins of small events on mind-waves into pure spill. They are cerebral at the same time as being very deeply felt, nearly sentimental; they captivate the mind as well as hear and reading them sends me on my own inner journey through time and space and all the far or nearly forgotten moments of my own ordinary life."
"The continuously solid knit between lines keeps the reader of (no subject) somewhat breathless. The nouns are bathed in the luminous light of the everyday and the landscape underneath the poetry rolls along in time with its cosmic american music. 'I exercise echo beyond the neighbor’s pastel stucco and am similarly peeled back by the sun.' I felt a slight sonnet like cradling at work in this book. In fact, these perfectly weighted orchestrations are still dripping down the highways of my mind. There are goodbyes lingering at every corner and miniature librettos performed under heartbroken street light. The mood and phrasing pull equally hard to the point that I’m not sure which parts are magic and which are sleight of hand. I only know that I want back into this fading, crystalline world immediately."
"In these terse lyric meditations on the lightness of modern being, poems that veer toward and shy away from epigrammatic certainty, Peter Burghardt reports on what it means to embrace an ethos of responsibility without congealing into the fixtures of ideology ('you can’t choose something into truth, / like you can into concept'). The trappings are real, from epistemological pathos ('You got old enough to recall the shape/ of what you couldn’t remember') to existential dread ('a house is a special kind of box I spend/ my time in though I guess what adds up/ is always some kind of container/ punctuated by the vastness/ of the packaging.'). And Burghardt, like many of us, is not immune to the allure of 'online retail therapy' ('even though I’m running out of want/ the want waits for me'). Still, (no subject) offers its readers the real possibility of a future inasmuch as 'The hope of a moment/…stands apart from its birth.' And that hope is inseparable from Burghardt’s reminder that 'What was once destroyed/ is green today.'"
