Buffalo Free Rapid Transit - by Joe Hall (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Immerse yourself in a surreal, social poetics in a crisis-plagued Rust Belt city.

The sequel to Joe Hall's intense and unsparing Fugue & Strike, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through the city with a love letter to Buffalonians trying to get by.

In these poems, a cop cracks Martin Gugino's head open in front of the world; the wildfires of Ontario smudge the skies above while a home burns below; a white terrorist massacres ten members of Buffalo's Black community; and a city's failed response to a blizzard contributes to the deaths of forty-seven people. Hall grapples with Buffalo's decades of abandonment and its prominence in 2020-2023 as the site of violence and disaster that grabbed national headlines. Through it all, as Hall shows, Buffalonians had to live and cope and work and dream. The long and searching lines of these poems come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of Buffalo's better future crack open into each other.

About the Author

Joe Hall was first taught poetry by Lucille Clifton and decades of bad jobs. He is a writer and educator in Buffalo, where he spends the summers in the dirt. He is the author of several other books including, People Finder, Buffalo, Pigafetta Is My Wife, Someone's Utopia, The Devotional Poems, and Fugue & Strike, the latter four also published by Black Ocean.