Anthem Speed

By Christopher Bolin

Anthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin's emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin's poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: "among / the disinformation of the distress feeds," Bolin writes, "a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes."

This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions--with animal acuity--a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1609389212
• ISBN13: 9781609389215
• Release Date: November 2023
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 68 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 8.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up