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.

Review Quotes

"Days and nights in the city lowlands of this imperial core work and wear us down so completely that we have no choice but to feel everything. In such a state, in which one cannot escape being sick with the world, Joe Hall's poetry--which I've been reading so long, I've grown up with it--is a transit map and, more bracingly, a kind of vengeance. It hews so close to the bone of existence, it chews through it; it drinks the marrow for us, transforming despair into ecstasy for us. It is, in this way, sacrificial. As Hall says, deep in the blazing guts of this book: 'that's the job: / touch the ashes / touch and touch / the ashes.'"--Brandon Shimoda, author of The Afterlife Is Letting Go

"BUFRAT digs its toes into chemical effluvia & slurring waste to square up to the bad commons & enclosures of the now, asking: 'what's a city?' & what's to be done when the very infrastructures of state violence share walls with those of care work, when cop infestations, landgrabs & corporate plunder grip & foreclose prospects of life itself? Part insurgent refusal, part radical conjuration, such lines of questioning open into re-purposeful dreaming: in place of capitalist decadence with its henchmen, developers & shimmering rubble, Hall proposes the apiary & shelter without limit. Proposes, out from 'webs of getting by, ' 'the fugue, the thread' -- a provisional ligature for better relations, a living weave that thrums in spite of it all."--Knar Gavin

About the Author