Binding: A Preparation by Alex Chambers
Binding: A Preparation by Alex Chambers
Published December 2019 by Pickpocket Books
An imprint of Ledge Mule Press
Poetry, 110 pages
Paperback, 6 x 8.25
In poems that move from a “tiny wooden bust of Richard Nixon” to a “beautiful imperfect heart,” from a longing for faith to sudden moments of grace, from anxiety to humor and back to more anxiety, Alex Chambers chronicles domestic life in the midst of war, environmental devastation, and global capitalism. In this book you’ll encounter the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, William Cullen Bryant, the Nasdaq, Karl Marx, Troy Davis, Mary Wollstonecraft, a chicken, a peach, and at least forty-six different kinds of apples. These poems—before the birth of a child, before the end of a marriage—are preparations for a future we can’t predict, always skirting catastrophe, in which we find ourselves bound to all kinds of each others, and reminding us, finally, that “we’re just here taking care for a while.”
Read more about Alex Chambers
Book design by Rose Wehrenberg
I think we think that nothing prepared us for this very present and persistent existential apocalypse—the planet on fire and the fact of it obfuscated by the dazzleflage of deconstructed truth and beauty—but there were signs, there were signs. Signposts of post-capital, post-industrial anxious angst that Alex Chambers posts in his eloquent elegiac Binding: A Preparation. If worry is thought to be a failure of the imagination, these well-wrought poems worry worry in startling and stark detail, and, in spite of the endless entropy, imagine again and again, the unimaginable. Chambers is, in this wrecked and wrenching moment, our Keats, and in this fractured and fractal world, local and global, he regards, our fire-engine red-figured ruined rune-laden urn, he is always already to kiss it all goodbye.
— Michael Martone, author of Brooding and The Moon Over Wapakoneta