All About You

Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon's fifth book of poetry,All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it.

"You almost let your ego go," he writes, "but oh-/maybe tomorrow." Revolving through moments of sociability and passages of inwardness, the poet's address shifts in these poems from "I" to "you" and back again, inviting his audience to shift along with him. Out of that agility,All About Youbuilds a generous model of what it means to pay attention, and drafts a delicately post-pandemic "we":"imagine what a healed people could do / Just flesh full of chatter / Hush now / Come on, let's run "

“Although a poet of ideas, Nealon’s agenda serves as architecture, not interior design.  The poems themselves prove grounded and sharp.  He has a gift for swift compression (“I came of age in the great mixtape /swap meet of the 1980s”) and original observation (“There’s gonna be a lot of fronting about ‘the apocalypse’ between now and the apocalypse”); he can even shatter the mundane with a novel chime, as when he writes, ‘because we need art to remind us that life is hard, / I wonder’—and it is the wonder, the doubt, that renders the lines human.” —Jacob M. Appel, National Book Critics Circle

“The primary thing I feel reading Chris Nealon’s The Shore is gratitude. Gratitude that he exists as a writer and thinker, as a human. Gratitude to him for writing this book, whose resonances only deepen in a COVID-crisis world.”—Allison Cobb, Lambda Literary Review

Reading Nealon, one feels as though Homer has been reincarnated in sound bites, or as though Coleridge has succeeded in reviving the song of the damsel with her dulcimer, and we realize it is both as delightful and as laughable as we could have imagined. Nealon is both god and jester, beckoning us close even as he warns us to beware.”—The Volta

“Nealon taps into the energies of popular culture without condescension or self-congratulation or (easy) irony; his poems are at once totally well-wrought and unaffectedly conversational; he is clear-eyed about the catastrophe of the present but refuses to descend into mere melancholy; he has no illusions about poetry’s practical power but he is not in love with—or particularly tortured by—its marginality; Nealon—an accomplished literary critic—neither disavows his learning or retreats into it.”—Ben Lerner, The Millions

Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020), The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), as well as three books of literary criticism. He lives in Washington, DC.

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