#TheNewCrusades - by Bill Neumire (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Against a backdrop of newsfeeds and hints of eco-doom, #TheNewCrusades centers on a series of letters to an uncertain deity hovering above and within a particular American madness. These poems are fractured little diaries seeking a wholeness; they track the ways we move back and forth between larger social-political selves and inner-personal selves. The news here is professed through protests, graffiti, broken mirrors, ambient radio, synchronized fires, and all-night newsfeeds--all of it projecting a cryptic and indefinable set of rules that churn about as permutations of some lost algorithm. They address a tamed violence held barely in check, examining masculinity and fatherhood and the undercurrents of suburban domesticity. In the end, they are a barrage of cries at breaking the boundary between you and I, questions rising into prayers that ask, are we closed or open systems? Can we really know each other at all?

Review Quotes

As Bill Neumire shows, to tell the truths about America requires a lyricism that is as wily as it is direct, as elegiac as it is exuberant. #TheNewCrusades is a reckoning about the coal-mouthed glow of the American heart and the darkness & us that characterizes the messy promise of our body politic. Well past Whitman's earnest appraisal of who we were, Neumire instead sees the alarming contradictions of who we really are, made fruitful & rueful by our metastatic news and hungers. Brash and also tender, Neumire's poems are the honest lullabies we need now to keep from sleep, to open our eyes, to wake up.

Rick Barot

Professor of English

Director, The Rainier Writing Workshop

Pacific Lutheran University

#TheNewCrusades begins "Here I take the box of world..." and the book does just that. It's a box, and a book, that foretells violence, questions masculinity, mourns the falling away of cities and nations and nature and people. Bill Neumire has an ear for the memorable phrase, an eye for the image that hurts. "Dear hashtagged american morning, / if you promise / everything's fine I can stand in a pall of crabapple leaves / like an elephant feeling seismic signals," he writes, not believing it for a second. But these poems believe: in the leaves and the elephant and the hashtagged morning, then undergo them all like a trial. The box of world is recognizably ours: we have all undergone it, but never so eloquently nor with such patient clarity as this book does.

Kathy Ossip