JOEL FELIX

CONCEALED NATIONS

In an agitated, elegiac, and personalized series of poetic propositions, Joel Felix in Concealed Nations, his follow up to Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die, engages questions of justice both racial and social, white survivalism and gun-rights communities, family life and loss, drone strikes and the Islamic State, lab testing, and lyric lineage and transcendence. Tyrone Williams, writing in Jacket2, called Limbs “a moving meditation on the impossibility and necessity of poetry, on history as ‘enslavement without end,’ and the possibility, however unlikely, that there remains, its brutalities notwithstanding, a truth-telling residue in language.” Concealed Nations presses that truth-telling towards oracle and curse, finding a voice of clarity and frustration to reflect the times. “The page,” writes Felix, “is the glass I am trying to break.”

“Joel Felix’s Concealed Nations doesn’t want to show us the path we must take, and it doesn’t want to tell us what to think or how to feel. Concealed Nations shows us the paths we are taking or have taken along the highways and byways of American historical and ideological violence. If in his poetry we hear that ‘Virtue is having the courage/ to show what we’re all thinking/ with casual display,’ we discover that Felix demands and rewards attentiveness to what is casually displayed and pointedly concealed. The language of the poetry, at times frighteningly effortless and offhand, at times brutally imaged, at other times painful specific in its science and pseudo-science, articulates the discourses by which we have dressed and traduced the world and its people. It gives us litanies of degraded post-industrial cornucopias, lexicons of the street sounds of our racialized, militarized minds. The madness of the age stutters in the foreground, the madness of the past murmurs in the background, but there is more than a whisper of courage and hope, and we get clearer perceptions of where we are now.”

Dave Karp

ISBN 978-0-9889885-7-6

$19

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