Stratigraphy by Andrew Cantrell

Andrew Cantrell has given this extended meditation on the imaginary relationship between nature and politics a palpable form that allows readers to experience the text as a slow landscape of texture and thought. The book is a (Circle chain of hours, a reflection in a bounded lake surrounded by the crags of language – as nature is represented in text, the politics become clearly reflected in the writing. This book not only approaches such relationships in philosophical ways, but creates a form where the possibility of physical exploration is also recreated.

–Laura Goldstein, author of “loaded arc” and “awesome camera” and co-curator of the Red Rover Reading Series, teaches at Loyola University in Chicago.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

“A moment that now punctuates a gap in glacial memory through which falls another history.” A geography of time travel in an ice age. A language landscape for the Midwest. A poem is something we build together. I’m reminded of reasons I’ve lived most of my life next to these Great Lakes.

–Jennifer Karmin, author of “Aaaaaaaaaaalice”

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

Cantrell’s verse excavates the myriad mystic fissures between poetics and politics, formation and deformation, evolution and extinction, loss and loess. Epic time-lapse snapshots of an overwhelming glacial becoming, these deep and loamy poems employ a tectonics at once ancient and futuristic, sedimentary and lacustrine, earthy and cosmic. “Tantamount to an angel in the dawning,” our revolutionary prehistory has herein been inscribed with a heavy metal quill. Stratigraphy is our elemental manifesto. Till, dear reader, till.

–Kevin Carollo teaches world literature and writing at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]