Joel Craig

Humanoid Joel Craig

These marvelous, intently dialogic poems believe in that presence (and that absence) that we call 'the reader.' In HUMANOID, each sharply measured poem staggers down the page in its self-interrupting performance, tilting and darting toward an elusive social possibility--that we, whatever 'we' are, might actually come to somehow dwell together. These poems do so in their own fleet idiom of admonishment--self-admonishment and admonishment directed toward others, reader included. It all combines in the rushing substance full of sting, care and delight that is this poetry's movement. Alertly observant of its own cognition, and the foibles of cognition at the interior of its historical moment, this is harsh and tender, often funny and always deeply urgent work that Joel Craig has given us. Despite all the forces pushing against the possibility of such a thing, there is much love in it.--Anthony McCann

The speaker of the poems of Joel Craig's HUMANOID floats and careens in the interstices between tract housing, breaking news, love, and existential questions regarding time in the Anthropocene, so called. The difference between what we want to hear and the alternative is terrifying, but it is also where life is now. This book says such things.--Lucy Ives

Poetry.