concrete, rust, marrow by Connor Beeman ***Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award Winner***

Connor Beeman is a poet of grief and compassion who “cannot wear cruelty like others,. . ./or opt for blindness. . .” I admire the heart, imagery and syntax of this necessary book, the poems’ titles spilling into lines like blood or iron, giving us an original language of what it means to return home to the Rust Belt. Through narrative, meditative and lyrical poems, here is a fresh new voice of rivers, cities, dust and barges on the brink of a new and better world. Listen to Beeman who, even in descendant gestures, holds onto hope, who will “make something of this/There must be something in all of this.” Wake to Beeman’s promise to see “not just the sky, but the earth itself, rising to meet us.”

–Janine Certo, Author of Elixir, winner of the 2020 New American Poetry Prize and 2020 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize

In his award-winning collection, concrete // rust // marrow, Connor Beeman fashions a queer identity out of the twin poles of history, specifically the AIDS crisis, and geography, here, the decay of an American city, specifically, Akron Ohio, by naming all this wreckage and assembles a life that can wield the forging cleansing power of fire. It’s hard work, but Beeman moves deliberately and unafraid through this landscape of dead fire symbolized in an old match factory, shattered steel mill men and “10,000 dead [from AIDS] by ‘86.” And though he’s “come too late to save anything,” he finds a new path forward in the paradoxical harmless recklessness children model for us – one where he knows “nothing of the world/except that it is [his] own. This is an intelligent and uplifting spiritual mapping of self and place where Beeman transcends the “separate wards” of city and elders and the many dead and realizes they are “one and the same.”

–Dennis Hinrichsen, Lansing Poet Laurate Emeritus & author of schema geometrica and [q / lear]

In this, his debut chapbook, Connor Beeman brings the reader in close—as close as the concrete, rust and rebar of defunct factories; the shattered men of the steel mill town; the scourge of acid-poisoned rivers and bruised land; the adolescent discovery of too-often-forbidden sexuality; and the anguish of queer bodies lost to drugs and AIDS. His observations are astute and shattering: “how do you become a man when what makes a man is gone?” and “I am not sure there’s time to / save anything anymore.” Yet at the center of a collection that addresses destruction, decay and dis-ease, there is a celebration of persistence, a commitment to healing of self and city. “this place wants something from me. / I don’t know what” Beeman writes; “give me this wreckage / and I will assemble what I can.”  In offering us concrete // rust // marrow, Beeman evokes for readers an unflinching sense of grief and loss, but he offers as well a perspective on survival and a hard-earned strength, resilience, and pride.

–Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust (winner of the Midwest Book Award for poetry), former poet laureate of Lansing, Michigan.